What is it about?

We incubated natural communities of ciliates, a pretor of micro algae, with various prey (micro algae) and predator (copepods). We observed that just been incubated in confined environment impact strongly the community. We also observed that predators tend to have a stronger impact on the composition of ciliates than other plankton and the prey composition (species) seems to impact less the ciliates .

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Why is it important?

Here we showed that laboratory incubations while helpful are not a direct measurement of what is happening in the environment. Some species doesn't like to be carried in a confined environment. We also realized that some stochasticity is at play to predict the composition of plankton community as we show with the variability across our replicates incubated in the same condition.

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This page is a summary of: Incubation and grazing effects on spirotrich ciliate diversity inferred from molecular analyses of microcosm experiments, PLOS One, May 2019, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0215872.
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