Predation on planktonic ciliates in Kenyan soda lakes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ciliated protozoa are important components of the plankton of aquatic systems with ability to recycle nutrients and to link microbial food webs to metazoans. This is because they are numerous and have higher growth rates compared to other unicellular eukaryotes of similar size. Predation and competition are some of the factors that negatively affect their abundance and growth. Studies documenting the impact of predation by zooplankton on ciliates have been conducted in marine and freshwaters waters but are lacking in tropical waters especially soda lakes in Kenya. In this study, growth rates of planktonic ciliates were estimated in four soda lakes, Lakes Bogoria, Elmenteita, Simbi and Sonachi, using predator exclusion experiments. In the experiments, ciliate populations increased faster in incubations of lake water with the >40 µm fraction removed than in untreated controls. The difference in these rates was taken as an estimate of predation by zooplankton >40 µm (Mz), and ranged from 0.091 to 3.171 d−1. Our best estimates of growth rates for particular ciliates abundant enough to derive estimates for ranged from 0.18 to 4.78 d−1. When removing the >40 µm fraction did not result in increased numbers of ciliates relative to controls, we hypothesized that this was due to predators within the <40 µm fraction (Mc) and their release from zooplankton predators. We assessed and supported this hypothesis by looking at the production of ciliates in different feeding guilds. The significance of predation on ciliates to the food webs of soda lakes is discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".