A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article. Environmental fluctuations present a fundamental challenge to organisms as changing conditions may result in mismatch between environment and organismal phenotypes. One way which populations persist thrive is through their capacity adapt phenotypes on time frame relevant environmental variation. The ab...

Zooplankton organisms with short generation times, such as rotifers, are ideal models to study general ecological and evolutionary questions on the population level, because meaningful experiments can often be completed within a couple of weeks. Yet biological analysis of such populations is often extremely time consuming, owing to abundance estimation by counting, measuring body size, or deter...