Life at the edge: Is food quality really of minor importance at low quantities?

By M. Boersma, C. Kreutzer. 2002

147 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There is increasing evidence that the quality of nutrient-limited algae is suboptimal for zooplankton production. These effects of nutrient limitation are supposed to be important mainly at higher concentrations of food because at lower quantities the overall energetic limitation of body growth should hide the effect of mineral limitations. This has been hypothesized in a variety of papers, but experimental evidence is still weak. In the present study we carried out a set of growth experiments investigating the effect of food quality at very low food levels ranging from 30 μg C/L up to 150 μg C/L. In all of the experiments, the growth rates of Daphnia magna neonates were lower when grown on P-limited Scenedesmus obliquus. This effect disappeared when phosphorus was added to the P-limited algae prior to feeding, indicating that mineral limitation can occur even at very low levels of food. Neonates born to mothers raised on either high- or low-P Scenedesmus were analyzed for body mass and lipid content as well as mass-specific phosphorus content to check for possible differential investment into neonates in different environments. Although mass-specific phosphorus content was higher in animals born from mothers grown on high-P algae, when fed low quantities of P-limited algae, growth rates of neonates born under low-P conditions were higher than those of animals born under high-P conditions. This can be explained by an increased body lipid content of low-P neonates, even though there were no differences in neonate body mass between treatments. These results illustrate the importance of the incorporation of low food concentrations in ecological stoichiometry models.

Subfields: Ecology, Environmental Chemistry, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c8205cb8dea0caa7f200e8a8f9752dbe4d4769e3

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Citations in the corpus

Food quantity and quality regulation of trophic transfer between primary producers and a keystone grazer (Daphnia) in pelagic freshwater food webs (2007, background): “Implicit in Eq. 6 is that food quality is important also when food quantity is low ( Boersma and Kreutzer 2002, Acharya et al. 2004), and that EPA:C is of nutritional importance even when phytoplankton P:C ratios are less than 0.0033, i.e.”
Life history strategies of cladocerans: comparisons of tropical and temperate taxa (2005, background): “D. magna Scendesmus obliquus 0.064–0.311 C 20 Boersma & Kreutzer (2002)”
Detritivory: stoichiometry of a neglected trophic level (2008, background): “If N is limiting, arthropods should conserve and retain this element, and ultimately reflect the differences in uptake potential due to variation in their resources (Boersma and Kreutzer 2002).”
Ecological stoichiometry: An elementary approach using basic principles (2013, background): “…C : P ratio is not likely to rise to infinity even under very low food quantities if excess C is used as energy to increase feeding activities (Boersma and Kreutzer 2002; Suzuki-Ohno et al. 2012; see below) or if P is lost as maintenance cost even under zero-growth conditions (Anderson and…”
Nutrient limitation of primary producers affects planktivorous fish condition (2007, background): “Hence, zooplankton homeostasis should be regarded as relaxed in nature rather than strict (Plath and Boersma 2001; Boersma and Kreutzer 2002).”
Resource quality effects on life histories of Daphnia (2003, unknown): “In contrast, Boersma and Kreutzer (2002) observed no significant effects in offspring weight between offspring born from mothers grown on P-limited and -sufficient algae.”
Differential effects of phosphorus and fatty acids on Daphnia magna growth and reproduction (2005, unknown): “Egg production is determined by the energy availability during the first part of each instar (Bradley et al. 1991). Thus, females enrich their eggs with a pool of fat, which improves neonates’ resistance to starvation. The increased concentration of EPA, ARA, and ESA fatty acids in food resulted in ”
Biological stoichiometry of Daphnia growth: An ecophysiological test of the growth rate hypothesis (2004, background): “P supplementation experiments have shown that at least some of this growth reduction is a direct result of dietary P deficiency (DeMott et al. 1998; Boersma and Kreutzer 2002; Sterner and Elser 2002).”
From Elements to Function: Toward Unifying Ecological Stoichiometry and Trait-Based Ecology (2017, background): “:P food is often of low-quality for a variety of organisms including molluscs (Stelzer and Lamberti, 2002; Fink and Elert, 2006), crustaceans (Boersma and Kreutzer, 2002; Meunier et al., 2012, 2016a), insects (Perkins et al., 2004), fish (Borlongan and Satoh, 2001; Vrede et al., 2011), and birds…”
Preliminary estimates of the export of omega-3 highly unsaturated fatty acids (EPA+DHA) from aquatic to terrestrial ecosystems (2009, background): “Somatic growth of Daphnia correlates with EPA content in seston (i.e., with food quality), rather than with sestonic carbon content (i.e., with food quantity) (e.g., Müller-Navarra 1995 ; Gladyshev et al. 2006a) even for very low food levels (Boersma and Kreutzer 2002) .”
Ecological Stoichiometry, Biogeochemical Cycling, Invasive Species, and Aquatic Food Webs: San Francisco Estuary and Comparative Systems (2011, background): “Yet, homeostasis comes at a cost, typically as a reduction in the rates of growth or reproduction (Boersma, 2000 ; Boersma and Kreutzer, 2002 ; Boersma et al, 2008 ).”