Journal
OECOLOGIA
Volume 190, Issue 1, Pages 195-205Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s00442-019-04401-4
Keywords
Eutrophication; Nutrient enrichment; Toxic cyanobacteria; Microcystin; Management; Harmful algal blooms (HABs); Nitrogen; Phosphorus; Bottom-up; Consumer offense; Evolution
Categories
Funding
- EPA STAR Graduate Fellowship
- NSF [DEB-0841864, DEB-0841944, DBI-0965272]
- Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station
- Hatch program of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture
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Humans have artificially enhanced the productivity of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems on a global scale by increasing nutrient loading. While the consequences of eutrophication are well known (e.g., harmful algal blooms and toxic cyanobacteria), most studies tend to examine short-term responses relative to the time scales of heritable adaptive change. Thus, the potential role of adaptation by organisms in stabilizing the response of ecological systems to such perturbations is largely unknown. We tested the hypothesis that adaptation by a generalist consumer (Daphnia pulicaria) to toxic prey (cyanobacteria) mediates the response of plankton communities to nutrient enrichment. Overall, the strength of Daphnia's top-down effect on primary producer biomass increased with productivity. However, these effects were contingent on prey traits (e.g., rare vs. common toxic cyanobacteria) and consumer genotype (i.e., tolerant vs sensitive to toxic cyanobacteria). Tolerant Daphnia strongly suppressed toxic cyanobacteria in nutrient-rich ponds, but sensitive Daphnia did not. In contrast, both tolerant and sensitive Daphnia genotypes had comparable effects on producer biomass when toxic cyanobacteria were absent. Our results demonstrate that organismal adaptation is critical for understanding and predicting ecosystem-level consequences of anthropogenic environmental perturbations.
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