Department Aquatic Ecology

This project aims at investigating Quagga mussels’ resilience and adaptation under multiple environmental conditions to predict how they will develop in the changing Lake Constance. The project will experimentally assess Quagga mussels’ resilience to temperature stress, ioxygen limitation, pollution and resource limitation using laboratory experiments on shallow and deep mussels and comparing their associated epigenomics and transcriptomic signatures. The project will also investigate DNA methylation changes in Quagga mussel populations collected in the field and monitor yearly the distribution of Quagga mussels in Lake Constance to better project their distribution in the future. This project is part of the larger project SeeWandel-Climate: Modelling the consequences of climate change and neobiota for Lake Constance.