Where feeding happens matters.
Fungicide sharply reduced feeding. Predator effects and the interaction between the two pressures differed between the zone beneath the cage and the peripheral zones.
Inside one experiment · Published research
When predation
meets pollution.
A small freshwater animal.
Fallen leaves. Two pressures acting together.
What happens to feeding when a chemical exposure coincides with the risk of being eaten?
Explore the four conditions
01 · Start with the organism
Small animals.
An everyday ecological job.
Asellus aquaticus feeds on decaying leaves in freshwater. To understand how pressures change that feeding, we brought a chemical exposure and a predator into the same controlled experiment.
The central question was simple: do their combined effects look the same wherever an animal feeds?
02 · Change the conditions
One experiment.
Four combinations.
Choose the water treatment and whether the cage contains a predator. Each combination reveals a finding from the published experiment.
01 · Water treatment
02 · Predator treatment
Control
The reference condition.
Clean water and an empty cage provide the baseline for comparing leaf consumption under the other conditions.
A predator without an attack
Follow the evidence During this phase, a mesh-bottom cage kept the dragonfly larva away from the experimental animals. Cues could pass into the water.
How the comparison was made
The four treatments combined control water or nominal 50 µg/L tebuconazole in a commercial formulation with an empty cage or a caged Aeshna dragonfly larva. Each treatment had five tanks, initially containing 20 adult Asellus aquaticus. Tanks were held at 17 °C for 21 days.
Standardised alder leaf discs were offered in three feeding zones. Weekly photographs measured leaf area lost. Tanks were the experimental replicates for feeding. The predator was fed other isopods inside the cage, so the water carried cues from both the predator and injured prey.
03 · Follow the effects
Feeding is one part
of the story.
The movement response changed.
Predator-naive animals in clean water reduced movement after predator cues were added. No cue effect on movement was detected in fungicide-exposed animals.
This measures a behavioural response; it does not establish damage to a particular sensory mechanism.
Previous experience mattered.
Animals previously exposed to a caged predator survived better when later facing a freely moving predator. Evidence that fungicide changed this benefit was uncertain.
The same environmental pressure can affect feeding, behaviour and later survival differently. Understanding the response means looking at the interaction, the setting and what happened before.
The study behind the story
Read the evidence.
Mohan, A., Matthews, B., & Räsänen, K. (2026). Predation risk magnifies fungicide-driven suppression of keystone shredder feeding and behaviour, slowing freshwater leaf-litter degradation. Environmental Pollution, 390, 127490. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2025.127490
This laboratory study measured organismal responses and leaf consumption. The interactive illustration explains its design and findings; it is not a predictive simulation.