Littoral and offshore communities of diatoms, cladocerans and dipterous larvae, and their interpretation in paleolimnology

Abstract

The remains of diatoms, cladocerans, and midges are usually the most abundant of freshwater organisms and to now have been most useful in interpreting past conditions in a lake. Each taxocene consists of two separate communities, one in the warm littoral zone and the other offshore. Remains of inshore organisms are moved offshore by wind-generated currents, the amount of transport varying with individual characteristics of the lakes. Nowhere do remains of the two communities become completely integrated numerically, although the remains of the littoral chydorid Cladocera become integrated by species before they are incorporated into the sediments. The taxa of the planktonic Eubosmina and of the offshore midges correspond to levels of productivity in present-day lakes, and hence changes in the fossil record are commonly regarded as indicating eutrophication over time. The deepwater midges respond to the concentration of dissolved oxygen in deep water, which may be controlled more by a decrease in volume of deep water through accumulation of sediments than by any real increase in edaphic productivity. While such changes are going on offshore during the Holocene, the littoral communities of cladocerans and midges are scarcely changing at all, suggesting a different response of the inshore from the offshore communities to longterm changes resulting from increasing productively or from other functions. Thus, considering these different responses of the two communities of organisms and their incomplete mixing, the remains of littoral and offshore taxa recovered from an offshore core of sediments must be tabulated separately and interpreted separately. For any studies involving accumulation rates, there must be an understanding of the integration of inshore and offshore remains, its variation over the lake bottom, and how it may have varied with marked fluctuations in water level.