Preface: Patterns and processes of meiofauna in freshwater ecosystems
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MEIOFAUNA IN FRESHWATER ECOSYSTEMS
Preface: Patterns and processes of meiofauna in freshwater ecosystems Nabil Majdi
. Jenny M. Schmid-Araya . Walter Traunspurger
Received: 10 April 2020 / Revised: 8 May 2020 / Accepted: 14 May 2020 / Published online: 26 May 2020 Ó Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Never heard of harpacticoids, ostracods, gastrotrichs or microturbellarians? This is no surprise, they are so tiny! Yet these taxa and many others more famous (nematodes, rotifers, or tardigrades) show complex behaviours and extraordinary physiologies that allow them to colonize inland waters worldwide. This exuberant fauna is better known as the meiofauna (or meiobenthos). Meiofaunal organisms have been fascinating study objects for zoologists since the seventeenth century and recent research has demonstrated their intermediate role in benthic food webs. This special issue highlights how meiofauna can help freshwater ecologists to describe and predict species distribution patterns, to assess production of biomass and trait functions relationships, as well as to examine the trophic links between microscopic and macroscopic worlds and to better understand species’ resilience to environmental extremes. Overall, meiofaunal organisms are bridging scales, and as such they
Guest editors: Nabil Majdi, Jenny M. Schmid-Araya & Walter Traunspurger / Patterns and Processes of Meiofauna in Freshwater Ecosystems N. Majdi (&) W. Traunspurger Department of Animal Ecology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany e-mail: [email protected] J. M. Schmid-Araya Department of Life and Environmental Sciences, Bournemouth University, Poole, UK
deserve better integration to develop more comprehensive concepts and theories in ecology. Keywords Invertebrates Distribution Body size Trophic interactions Meiobenthos A lifetime can be spent in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree. –Edward O. Wilson. And not all of what one might learn from such a voyage would be transferable to the next tree. –An elegant chaos, Nature Editorial 11 March 2014.
The meiofauna comprises small-sized organisms attached or associated to particles and benthic substrates, commonly depicted as those passing through a 1 mm and retained on a 42 lm mesh net (Fenchel, 1978; Higgins & Thiel, 1988). Within this size-range, a plethora of phyla is included from microscopic protists and rotifers to almost macroscopic oligochaetes, water mites and chironomids (see Fig. 1 and front cover of the special issue). The most numerically dominant groups in freshwater systems are protists, rotifers, nematodes, oligochaetes, microcrustaceans and larval chironomids, but also tardigrades, gastrotrichs and microturbellarians can achieve high densities in some habitats. We performed an analysis of the recent meiofaunal literature searching peer-reviewed publications issued
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Fig. 1 Some examples of fre
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