Representation of aquatic invertebrate communities in subfossil death assemblages sampled along a salinity gradient of western Uganda crater lakes |
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Authors: | Email author" target="_blank">Bob?RumesEmail author Hilde?Eggermont Dirk?Verschuren |
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Institution: | (1) Department of Biology, Section Limnology and Animal Ecology, Ghent University, K.L. ledeganckstraat 35, Ghent, 9000, Belgium |
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Abstract: | We analysed subfossil death assemblages of aquatic invertebrate communities in a salinity series of 35 western Uganda maar-crater
lakes to evaluate their potential as biological indicators of past habitat conditions in paleo-environmental research. The
study region encompasses the climatological and hydrological gradient between the dry floor and moist shoulders of the Edward-George
branch of the East African Rift Valley, and includes mesotrophic to hyper-eutrophic, and shallow unstratified to deep meromictic
lakes with a surface-water salinity range between 101 and 135 400 μS/cm. Focusing on non-chironomid aquatic invertebrates with good fossil preservation, we found that fossil larval remains
of the Dipteran families Culicidae, Ephydridae, and Stratiomyidae are good indicators of saline environments. Our data further
suggest that the abundances of Bryozoan statoblasts and Chaoboridae are indicative of, respectively, the fraction of the littoral
zone covered by aquatic macrophytes and of lake trophic state, but a lake reference data set more specifically designed to
cover variation in these environmental factors will be needed to determine the strength of these relationships. In these small,
simple lake basins, recent death assemblages recovered from a single mid-lake surface-sediment sample provides a more complete
inventory of local aquatic invertebrate communities and the distribution of species among lakes than exploratory live sampling
of those taxa in a selection of littoral, benthic and pelagic habitats. |
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Keywords: | Africa aquatic insects Bryozoa Chaoborus Diptera Ephemeroptera paleo-environmental reconstruction paleolimnology Trichoptera Turbellaria |
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