Does body storage act as a food‐availability cue for adaptive adjustment of egg size and number in Daphnia magna?

Abstract

1. The hypothesis that body storage is used by daphniids as a physiological cue for adaptively adjusting egg size and number to food availability was tested.2. Egg size and number were examined to see whether they are related to individual variation in body storage independent of maternal size, genotype and food level. Egg mass and brood size (number of eggs in a brood) were compared to somatic mass, all adjusted to maternal body length, at two food levels in two parthenogenetic clones of Daphnia magna.3. The prediction that adjusted brood size should increase with body storage, whereas adjusted egg mass should decrease with increasing body storage, was not fulfilled as seven of eight comparisons failed to fit the expectation.4. It is concluded that body storage is probably not the food‐availability cue used by daphniids to control intrabrood resource allocation. Other possibilities, such as chemical cues emitted by food organisms and by coexisting cladocerans, are briefly discussed.