Quantifying a trait-mediated indirect effect of an environmental stressor on population dynamics

Trait-mediated indirect interactions have been intensively studied to understand ecological dynamics in biological communities. On the other hand, little is known about the relative importance of trait-mediated indirect effects of environmental stressors on population dynamics. How does an environmental stressor indirectly affect the population dynamics of a focal species by altering the traits of interacting species and the strength of interspecific interactions? Here, we quantified the direct and trait-mediated indirect effects of an environmental stressor by combining rotifer-alga experiments and Bayesian parameter estimation of a dynamic model. These days, human activities salinize freshwater lakes globally, thereby increasing (decreasing) the death (birth) rates of plankton species. Salinity stress is also known to induce clump formation in certain phytoplankton species. As larger clumps work as a defense trait against gape-limited predation of zooplankton, the salinity stress can affect zooplankton not only directly but also indirectly through phytoplankton trait changes. We first show that a green alga Chlamydomonas sphaeroides formed larger clumps than the two model species of green algae ( Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and Chlorella vulgaris ) under a moderate salinity stress (0.06M NaCl). Then, by tracking the clump size distributions of Chlamydomonas sphaeroides , we confirmed that small clumps are more vulnerable to predation by rotifers Brachionus calyciflorus as previous studies demonstrated. Finally, we co-cultured the green algae and rotifers for a week with and without salinity stress and fitted the Lotka-Volterra predator-prey model. We first nestimated how salinity stress increased the mortality rate of rotifers by using Chlorella vulgaris , which seldom showed clump formation. Then, we estimated how salinity stress decreased the attack rate of rotifers on Chlamydomonas sphaeroides due to clump formation. We found that salinity stress increased the rotifer’s mortality rate by 86% and decreased the attack rate on Chlamydomonas sphaeroides by 15%. These results indicate that salinity stress can weaken the predator-prey interaction, and thus salinization can harm freshwater zooplankton species through increasing the mortality rates and decreasing the attack rates. This will be an important step for a quantitative understanding of how environmental stressors can affect community dynamics via trait modifications.