Preface: Patterns and processes of meiofauna in freshwater ecosystems.

Never heard of harpacticoids, ostracods, gastrotrichs or microturbellarians? This is no surprise, they are so tiny! Yet these taxa and many others more famous (nematodes, rotifers, or tardigrades) show complex behaviours and extraordinary physiologies that allow them to colonize inland waters worldwide. This exuberant fauna is better known as the meiofauna (or meiobenthos). Meiofaunal organisms have been fascinating study objects for zoologists since the seventeenth century and recent research has demonstrated their intermediate role in benthic food webs.

Trophic positioning of meiofauna revealed by stable isotopes and food web analyses.

Despite important advances in the ecology of river food webs, the strength and nature of the connection between the meio- and macrofaunal components of the web are still debated. Some unresolved issues are the effects of the inclusion of meiofaunal links and their temporal variations on the overall river food web properties, and the significance of autochthonous and allochthonous material for these components. In the present study, we conducted analyses of gut content of macro- and meiofauna and stable isotope analyses of meiofauna to examine seasonal food webs of a chalk stream.

Life history allometries and production of small fauna.

The production of heterotrophic biomass is an important aspect of overall ecosystem functioning. However, single-celled organisms or microscopic metazoans are often ignored in studies of secondary production, despite being very abundant and possessing high mass-specific population growth rates, relative to the more widely studied larger taxa. Here, we focused on how life history parameters scale with body size of ciliates and meiofauna (body mass range from approximately 0.

Scaling in stream communities.

Scaling relationships between population density (N) and body size (W), and of their underlying size distributions, can contribute to an understanding of how species use resources as a function of size. In an attempt to resolve the controversy over the form of scaling relationships, an extensive dataset, comprising 602 invertebrate species, was obtained from two geographically separate stream communities (Seebach in Austria and Mynach in Wales). We analysed the temporal consistency of the N-W relationship, which was subjected to ordinary least squares (OLS), bisector (OLS(BIS)) and quantile regressions, and species-size spectra with seasonally collated data.