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Article: Life-history responses to variable environments: starvation and reproduction in planktonic rotifers.
- Article from:
- Ecology
- Article date:
- March 1, 1997
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 Ecological Society of America. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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INTRODUCTION
Many organisms live in nonequilibrium environments where resource abundance and quality can vary drastically over time, and extreme resource limitation or outright starvation is common. For example, marine bacteria lead a "feast or famine" existence (Koch 1971), cladoceran zooplankton often live "on the edge of starvation" (McCauley et al. 1990), and arctic mammals face harsh winters with little or no food (e.g., Atkinson and Ramsay 1995). The ability to survive resource deprivation is associated with everything from the physiology of bacteria (Morita 1993) to the body size of whales (Millar and Hickling 1990).
Temporal variation in resource ...