Don’t be mistaken. Things are not so quiet underneath the ice of frozen lakes… Some zooplankton species can persist under lake ice, but how do they cope with the extremely limiting food resources? Do they actually feed, but on what? Do they keep activity at minimal rate, to survive only from exhausting their fat stored during the previous good season? in which case, persistance of active species would not be equivalent to the persistance of an active food web under the ice…
Some answers in our paper soon to be published in Freshwater Biology: Fasting or feeding: a planktonic food web under lake ice.
