Abstract
Length–mass relationships are widely used to estimate body mass from body dimensions for freshwater macroinvertebrates. The relationships are influenced by environmental conditions and should be applied within ecosystems and geographic regions similar to those for which they were estimated. However, very few relationships exist for littoral macroinvertebrates, and thus we provide length–mass relationships for macroinvertebrates from lakes of the Central European lowlands. We compared log-linear and nonlinear methods for fitting length–mass relationships and tested the smearing factor for removing bias in mass predictions from log-linear models. We also estimated conversion factors to correct for mass changes during ethanol preservation and assessed the transferability of our results to different geographical regions. We showed that the log-linear approach gave better results in fitting length–mass relationships, while residuals showed that nonlinear models over-predict the mass of small individuals. The smearing correction factor successfully removed bias introduced by log transformation, and relationships transferred well between lakes in the same and different geographical regions. In total, 52 bias-corrected length–mass relationships are provided for littoral macroinvertebrates that are applicable also to lakes in geographic regions with similar environmental conditions, such as the Central European lowlands or the temperate lowland zone of America.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Martin Pusch, Jürgen Schreiber, Ursula Newen, and Thomas Hintze from the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries for their technical and taxonomical support. We thank our colleagues from the BTU Cottbus, Department of Freshwater Conservation, especially Brigitte Nixdorf, Ingo Henschke as well as Thomas Wolburg for the technical assistance. We thank Atilla Öztürk, Benjamin Wulfert, Christopher Witrin, Enrique Vazquez, Franziska Ullrich, Joyce-Ann Syhre, Juliane Hähnel, Katrin Kluge, Manuela Sann, and Patricia Penner for their helpful contribution on the processing of macroinvertebrate samples and length measurements. We thank Beat Oertli and two anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions that improved the manuscript substantially. Marlene Pätzig was funded by a grant from the International Graduated School of the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus, Senftenberg. Andrew Dolman was funded by the Nitrolimit project, www.nitrolimit.de, German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) grant numbers 033L041A and 0033W015AN. The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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Handling editor: Beat Oertli
Marlen Mährlein and Marlene Pätzig have contributed equally to this study.
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10750_2015_2526_MOESM2_ESM.pdf
Log-likelihoods and likelihood ratios for log-linear and nonlinear models fitted to each taxon and body dimension combination. (PDF 433 kb)
10750_2015_2526_MOESM3_ESM.pdf
Scatter plots between measured length and mass for each taxon together with the fitted log-linear and smearing-corrected log-linear regression models. (PDF 433 kb)
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Mährlein, M., Pätzig, M., Brauns, M. et al. Length–mass relationships for lake macroinvertebrates corrected for back-transformation and preservation effects. Hydrobiologia 768, 37–50 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-015-2526-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-015-2526-4