Effects of salinity and temperature on reproductive and life span characteristics of clonal Artemia. (International Study on Artemia. LXVI)

An apomictic clone of the tetraploid parthenogenetic Artemia population from M. Embolon (Thessaloniki, Greece) was assayed for 10 reproductive and life span characteristics under laboratory conditions (in various salinity and temperature regimes). Salinity was proved to have significant impact on the majority of the characters used in this study. Discriminant function analysis gave an overall prediction of 97.32% over the three salinities (50, 80 and 120 ppt). The temperature of 30°C seemed to be an extreme one affecting significantly nearly all of the studied variables. The overall prediction according to the discriminant analysis was 94.69% among the three temperatures (22, 26 and 30°C). The clone performed best at 80 ppt and 22°C. The data presented in this study may generate useful suggestions to investigate the potentiality of using a single genetic lineage in order to visualize the effects of different environmental cues on a specific clone.