1. Compared with rivers in more humid, forested ecoregions of eastern and midwestern U.S.A., rivers in semi-arid grassland of the U.S. Great Plains tend to be relatively shallow, more variable in discharge, and characterised by high suspended sediment loads. Although critical life stages of fish in prairie rivers probably depend at least partially on zooplanktonic food, data on community and di...

Some details of the uhrastructure of the syncytial stomach cell of the rotifer have been presented by Lansing (1). He has described the luminal membrane of the stomach cell as consisting of a thick reticular layer beneath a unit membrane 60 A thick. He noted a similarity between this layer and the terminal web of the intestinal epithelium. Lansing further observed goblet-shaped pockets in the g...

Global biodiversity losses provide an immediate impetus to elucidate the relationships between biodiversity, productivity and stability. In this study, we quantified the effects of species richness and species combination on the productivity and stability of phytoplankton communities subject to predation by a single rotifer species. We also tested one mechanism of the insurance hypothesis: whet...

BACKGROUND Rotifers are among the most common non-arthropod animals and are the most experimentally tractable members of the basal assemblage of metazoan phyla known as Gnathifera. The monogonont rotifer Brachionus plicatilis is a developing model system for ecotoxicology, aquatic ecology, cryptic speciation, and the evolution of sex, and is an important food source for finfish aquaculture. How...

Nutrient content of plants is low relative to that of herbivores. Dietary nutrients can limit the growth and reproduction of herbivores. We studied life history consequences and starvation resistance for a common planktonic rotifer, Keratella cochlearis, feeding on algae grown on nutrient-limited media. A strain of Cryptomonas was grown on three types of growth medium with nitrogen (N) and phos...

Rotifers due to their relatively short lifespan, high fecundity and high rate of population growth are ideal for chronic toxicity tests. The aim of this research was to determine the lethal concentrations (LC50 24 h) of deltamethrin and imidaclopride and their impacts on the reproduction and growth of the freshwater rotifer, Brachionus calyciflorus. Experiments were carried out based on the gui...