Rotifer community structure in three shallow lakes: seasonal fluctuations and explanatory factors

The present work aimed at studying the rotifer communities of three shallow eutrophic lakes in Portugal (lakes Mira, Vela and Linhos). At the time of the study, Mira and Vela faced large inputs of allochthonous nutrients, while Linhos was facing terrestrialisation, with cycles of dominance-senescence of macrophytes. The three lakes differed in terms of their abiotic features, with Linhos presenting very high nutrient levels and low pH, while Vela and Mira shared most of the characteristics. The rotifer communities of these two lakes were poorly diversified but highly abundant (max. > 2000 ind l⁻¹), with a clear dominance of eurytopic euplanktonic species (mainly Keratella cochlearis). On the other hand, Linhos presented lower abundances (<1000 ind l⁻¹) but higher species richness, mainly due to macrophyte-associated taxa, such as the littoral genera Lepadella, Testudinella and Squatinella. In all lakes, summertime represented a peak in terms of abundance and diversity. Canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) identified two main environmental gradients that shape up the rotifer assemblages: a temporal gradient, mainly related to temperature, and a eutrophy gradient, associated with nitrogenous nutrients. The latter gradient is clearly dependent on between-lake variation, due to the high nutrient levels observed in lake Linhos. Variance partitioning using CCA revealed that the largest portion (27.5%) of the total variation explained (52.1%) was attributed to the interaction between lake and environmental variables.