Cladoceran remains preserve selectively in lake sediments. Possibly all Cladocera species leave at least some identifiable remains in lake sediments. Exosceletal body parts of families Chydoridae and Bosminidae preserve best but other families are only variably represented in sediments by their outer body parts. Identification of all possible remains helps to achieve more precise palaeolimnological reconstruction of past ecosystems by Cladocera analysis. This article describes, together with photograph and line drawing the subfossil post-abdomen and post-abdominal claw of Ceriodaphnia, previously not widely identified.

Analyses of subfossil cladocerans (Crustacea: Cladocera) and chironomids (Diptera: Chironomidae) were applied to examine water-level changes in a small and oligotrophic lake in southern Finland over the past 2000 years. Major changes in the invertebrate communities occurred ca. 400 AD onwards when the littoral cladoceran Alonella nana started to replace the planktonic Eubosmina as the dominant species and chironomids Psectrocladius sordidellus group and Zalutschia zalutschicola increased. These changes were most likely due to a decreasing water level and an enlarging proportion of the littoral area, providing suitable vegetative habitats, e.g. aquatic bryophytes (mosses), for these taxa. The lowering water level reached its minimum just before the Medieval Warm Period, ca. 800-1000 AD, after which the lake level rose again and remained high until modern times. A prominent change in the chironomid assemblages occurred during the 20th century when Ablabesmyia monilis and Chironomus anthracinus type increased, presumably due to changes in water chemistry, caused by anthropogenic load of pollutants.

Independent Arctic records of temperature and precipitation from the same proxy archives are rare. Nevertheless, they are important for providing detailed information on long-term climate changes and temperature-precipitation relationships in the context of large-scale atmospheric dynamics. Here, we used chironomid and cladoceran fossil assemblages to reconstruct summer air- temperature and water-level changes, during the past 400 years, in a small lake located in Finnish Lapland. Temperatures remained persistently cold over the Little Ice Age (LIA), but increased in the 20th century. After a cooler phase in the 1970s, the climate rapidly warmed to the record-high temperatures of the most recent decades. The lake-level reconstruction suggested persistently wet conditions for the LIA, followed by a dry period between ~1910 and 1970 CE, when the lake apparently became almost dry. Since the 1980s, the lake level has returned to a similar position as during the LIA. The temperature development was consistent with earlier records, but a significant local feature was found in the lake-level reconstruction – the LIA appears to have been continuously wet, without the generally depicted dry phase during the 18th and 19th centuries. Therefore, the results suggest local precipitation patterns and enforce the concept of spatially divergent LIA conditions.

This paper gives a description of the head shield of Alona protzi, a rare species of Cladocera (water fleas) whose separated head shield has not yet been described in detail. Subfossil head shields of A. protzi were found in sediment cores taken from lakes in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia and Poland. Despite the rarity of the species this suggests a wide distribution of A. protzi in northern Europe. The ecology of A. protzi is poorly known. The environmental spectrum of the finding sites was wide and ranged from relatively nutrient poor clear water lakes to eutrophic turbid water lakes, indicating that A. protzi is not narrowly restricted. Most of the lakes were, however, meso-eutrophic with neutral to high pH, and with a relatively low abundance of submerged macrophytes. However, we cannot exclude the possibility that A. protzi mainly lives in groundwater and is only occasionally transported into lakes.