Do cytrids benefit the Colombia River food web?

This summer I am joining Tawnya Peterson’s lab where I will be mentored by Michelle Maier.  We will be culturing rotifers in the lab and observing how well they do when consuming phytoplankton, which are infected by chytrid fungus.  Rotifers live in the estuary of the Columbia River and where they are an available food source for juvenile salmon.  The chytrids attach to the phytoplankton and deplete nutrients from the phytoplankton cell.  When the rotifers can eat the phytoplankton, they eat the chytrids as well as the zoospores they produce.    We suspect that cytrids and zoospores provide even more nutrients for the rotifers and the food web of the Colombia River.  

                This week we started our rotifers growing.  They arrived through the mail in a little vial as dry cysts or eggs, which we simply added to a growing media to get them hatching.  Our rotifers started in a couple of petri dishes and in a day we had some swimming around.  Another day, some have already produced an egg.  Their lifespan is pretty short, about eleven days.  They get a filling diet of algae until we start our experiments, then they get the phytoplankton, chytrid fungus and zoospores.