An affordable and automated imaging approach to acquire highly resolved individual data—an example of copepod growth in response to multiple stressors

Individual trait variation is essential for populations to cope with multiple stressors and continuously changing environments. The immense number of possible stressor combinations and the influence of phenotypic variation makes experimental testing for effects on organisms challenging. The acquisition of such data requires many replicates and is notoriously laborious. It is further complicated when responses occur over short time periods. To overcome such challenges, we developed an automated imaging platform to acquire temporally highly resolved individual data. We tested this platform by exposing copepods to a combination of a biotic stressor (predator cues) and a toxicant (copper) and measured the growth response of individual copepods. We tested the automatically acquired data against published manually acquired data with much lower temporal resolution. We find the same general potentiating effects of predator cues on the adverse effects of copper, and the influence of an individual’s clutch identity on its ability to resist stress, between the data obtained from low and high temporal resolution. However, when using the high temporal resolution, we also uncovered effects of clutch ID on the timing and duration of stage transitions, which highlights the importance of considering phenotypic variation in ecotoxicological testing. Phenotypic variation is usually not acknowledged in ecotoxicological testing. Our approach is scalable, affordable, and adjustable to accommodate both aquatic and terrestrial organisms, and a wide range of visually detectable endpoints. We discuss future extensions that would further widen its applicability.