Family-portraits for daphnids: scanning living individuals and populations to measure body length

A method has been developed and tested to determine the body length of living daphnids. The purpose of the method was the simple, accurate, repeatable, quick, and to the living organism, harmless measurement of body length of all individuals in a population to enhance the capability of observing pop...

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Main Authors:	Agatz, Annika, Hammers-Wirtz, Monika, Gergs, Andre, Mayer, Tanja, Preuss, Thomas G.
Format:	Online
Language:	English
Published:	Springer US 2015
Online Access:	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4515252/

id	pubmed-4515252
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	pubmed-45152522015-07-27 Family-portraits for daphnids: scanning living individuals and populations to measure body length Agatz, Annika Hammers-Wirtz, Monika Gergs, Andre Mayer, Tanja Preuss, Thomas G. Technical Note A method has been developed and tested to determine the body length of living daphnids. The purpose of the method was the simple, accurate, repeatable, quick, and to the living organism, harmless measurement of body length of all individuals in a population to enhance the capability of observing population development over time. Generally, organisms are transferred to a petri dish and temporarily fixed by removing access medium. A picture of the petri dish is taken using an ordinary flatbed scanner. Pictures are manually analysed with purposely developed software. We found no significant impact of the method on either individual performance (growth and reproduction) or population development (abundance and structure) of daphnids in comparison to the previously used method for data gathering (sieving, counting and length measurement of a subsample via microscopy). The disadvantage of our method, an increased demand in time for picture analysis, is negligible compared to the advantages this method has. Data generated with the new method do represent the population structure more accurately than those data generated with the previously used method. Scanning organisms does also allow a retrospective quality control for generated data as pictures can securely be stored. The quality of the pictures is furthermore sufficient to include additional endpoints to the analysis (e.g., number and size of aborts, number and size of eggs in the brood pouch, spine length). Here, we present, test and discuss an alternative approach to automated image analysis for data gathering in single and multiple individual and species experiments. Springer US 2015-06-06 2015 /pmc/articles/PMC4515252/ /pubmed/26048239 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10646-015-1490-0 Text en © The Author(s) 2015 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
repository_type	Open Access Journal
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	US National Center for Biotechnology Information
building	NCBI PubMed
collection	Online Access
language	English
format	Online
author	Agatz, Annika Hammers-Wirtz, Monika Gergs, Andre Mayer, Tanja Preuss, Thomas G.
spellingShingle	Agatz, Annika Hammers-Wirtz, Monika Gergs, Andre Mayer, Tanja Preuss, Thomas G. Family-portraits for daphnids: scanning living individuals and populations to measure body length
author_facet	Agatz, Annika Hammers-Wirtz, Monika Gergs, Andre Mayer, Tanja Preuss, Thomas G.
author_sort	Agatz, Annika
title	Family-portraits for daphnids: scanning living individuals and populations to measure body length
title_short	Family-portraits for daphnids: scanning living individuals and populations to measure body length
title_full	Family-portraits for daphnids: scanning living individuals and populations to measure body length
title_fullStr	Family-portraits for daphnids: scanning living individuals and populations to measure body length
title_full_unstemmed	Family-portraits for daphnids: scanning living individuals and populations to measure body length
title_sort	family-portraits for daphnids: scanning living individuals and populations to measure body length
description	A method has been developed and tested to determine the body length of living daphnids. The purpose of the method was the simple, accurate, repeatable, quick, and to the living organism, harmless measurement of body length of all individuals in a population to enhance the capability of observing population development over time. Generally, organisms are transferred to a petri dish and temporarily fixed by removing access medium. A picture of the petri dish is taken using an ordinary flatbed scanner. Pictures are manually analysed with purposely developed software. We found no significant impact of the method on either individual performance (growth and reproduction) or population development (abundance and structure) of daphnids in comparison to the previously used method for data gathering (sieving, counting and length measurement of a subsample via microscopy). The disadvantage of our method, an increased demand in time for picture analysis, is negligible compared to the advantages this method has. Data generated with the new method do represent the population structure more accurately than those data generated with the previously used method. Scanning organisms does also allow a retrospective quality control for generated data as pictures can securely be stored. The quality of the pictures is furthermore sufficient to include additional endpoints to the analysis (e.g., number and size of aborts, number and size of eggs in the brood pouch, spine length). Here, we present, test and discuss an alternative approach to automated image analysis for data gathering in single and multiple individual and species experiments.
publisher	Springer US
publishDate	2015
url	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4515252/
_version_	1613252245861695488

Family-portraits for daphnids: scanning living individuals and populations to measure body length

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