Family-portraits for daphnids: scanning living individuals and populations to measure body length

A method has been developed and tested to determine the body length of living daphnids. The purpose of the method was the simple, accurate, repeatable, quick, and to the living organism, harmless measurement of body length of all individuals in a population to enhance the capability of observing population development over time. Generally, organisms are transferred to a petri dish and temporarily fixed by removing access medium. A picture of the petri dish is taken using an ordinary flatbed scanner. Pictures are manually analysed with purposely developed software. We found no significant impact of the method on either individual performance (growth and reproduction) or population development (abundance and structure) of daphnids in comparison to the previously used method for data gathering (sieving, counting and length measurement of a subsample via microscopy). The disadvantage of our method, an increased demand in time for picture analysis, is negligible compared to the advantages this method has. Data generated with the new method do represent the population structure more accurately than those data generated with the previously used method. Scanning organisms does also allow a retrospective quality control for generated data as pictures can securely be stored. The quality of the pictures is furthermore sufficient to include additional endpoints to the analysis (e.g., number and size of aborts, number and size of eggs in the brood pouch, spine length). Here, we present, test and discuss an alternative approach to automated image analysis for data gathering in single and multiple individual and species experiments. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10646-015-1490-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.