Browsing by Author "Sartamo, Laura"

Baltic Sea has undergone major changes in the last few decades and its ecological condition has changed. Paleolimnology provides methods to detect changes in the past, mostly from the times when no surveillance was conducted. This Master's thesis is about the response of a common Cladocera, Eubosmina maritima to the past environmental change in Sandöfjärden, Gulf of Finland. I studied past isotopes, δ13C and δ15N to detect past changes in the eutrophic changes from sedimented subfossil remains to detect how the E. maritima population abundance and morphology have changed due to eutrophication and increased predation pressure. I analyzed a 30 cm sediment core of which I counted E. maritima remains. I also measured the lengths of carapaces, mucros and antennules in order to detect changes in their morphology. I used carbon nitrogen ratio, total carbon, total nitrogen, and their stable status of the sea area. To indicate predation pressure on E. maritima, I used the resting egg data of a predatory cladocera Cercopagis pengoi, that was introduced to the area at the beginning of the 1990's. The sediment core is stratigraphic, meaning that the layers are connected to each other and therefore cannot be treated as independent samples. The data was first viewed graphically to reveal correlations. I applied redundancy analysis (RDA) to find out if changes in the Eubosmina-populations are explained by the environmental changes. Associated is Monte Carlo permutation test to check which explanatory variables are the most important. Finally I performed variance partitioning to separate the effects of the environment caused by time in the sediment time series. My results show that E. maritima population has increased in number since the 1950's and a positive correlation with δ15N suggests that this has a connection to increased nutrient levels. It also seems that big E. maritima individuals became more common in eutrophic conditions. Increased predation pressure affected E. maritima populations the strongest right after C. pengoi was introduced to the area when also the longest mucros were found. There also was a slight decrease in the E. maritima abundance at that time. The changes of the lengths of the appendages seem to be more connected to predation pressure, whereas the abundance and the overall body size seem to have a connection with eutrophication. Along with the eutrophication increased the number of E. maritima in the Gulf of Finland. The effect of predation pressure was the clearest right after the introduction and then later smoothened.