Diapausing egg banls, lake size, and genetic diversity in rotifer Brchionus plicatilis Müller (Rotifera, Monogononta)

Diapausing egg banks are reservoirs of ecological and genetic diversity in continental zooplankton. However, although habitat size has often been used as a proxy for population size, the relationship between diapausing egg bank size and genetic diversity has not been explicitly tested in zooplankton. We estimated the density and size of diapausing egg banks, habitat size and genetic diversity (for mitochondrial and nuclear markers) of 14 populations of the rotifer Brachionus plicatilis in an endorheic basin in the SE Iberian Peninsula. The size of B. plicatilis diapausing egg banks ranged across eight orders of magnitude (from 257 to 4.9 × 1010 eggs). Despite the small geographical scale, p…