Poster 15: Assessing zooplankton diversity in shallow lakes using resting egg banks

Because of pronounced spatial and temporal heterogeneity in shallow lake zooplankton communities, large scale and long term monitoring of its structure is a prerequisite for accurate assessment of its diversity. Resting egg banks have been shown to integrate a substantial part of this variability, and thus might provide a more cost-efficient way to determine zooplankton diversity. Indeed we found that identification of a given number of individuals hatched from natural resting egg pools results in a higher taxon richness than identification of an equal number of individuals retrieved in the water column of the corresponding lakes. Because incubation stimuli and mortality are taxon specific, assessment of zooplankton diversity through hatching experiments potentially results in a biased estimate of the real egg bank diversity. To quantify this bias we will hatch individually isolated resting eggs. This strategy will also enable us to verify whether morphological diversity in resting egg banks can be used as an estimate for taxonomical diversity.