COMMUNITY STRUCTURE OF MACROINVERTEBRATES IN LAKE ASA, ILORIN, NIGERIA
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Date
2025-07-29
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Animal Research International
Abstract
The integrity of Lake Asa's water quality depends on how various macroinvertebrate communities make their living more diversified, and contribute to complex food webs. In addition, the macroinvertebrate community are significantly used as indicator organisms to detect the pollution impacts in aquatic ecosystems. In this study, the diversity and community structure of macroinvertebrate and their relationship with environmental variables in Lake Asa, Ilorin, Nigeria, from February 2023 to February 2025. The study yielded 1421 individuals belonging to 3 phyla, 4 classes and 26 genera. The Bivalvia community, comprising 39.5% of the total taxonomic groups with Sphaerium sp. as the dominant macroinvertebrate species represented more than 15% of the total macroinvertebrate taxa and diversity indices were detected significant variations (p<0.05) among stations by the Kruskal-Wallis ANOVA, whereas Shannon-Wiener Diversity Index (H´) assessed moderate pollution, Evenness index (J) assessed uniform distributions of macrobenthic community, and environmental variables showed acceptable condition for the productivity of Lake Asa. Non-metric multidimensional scaling (nMDS) reveals distinct community structures among macroinvertebrate samples. Within macroinvertebrate communities, Canonical Correspondence Analysis (CCA) provided insights and interpretations of the relationships between species and environmental gradients. The macroinvertebrate community was most influenced by temperature, organic matter, DO, pH and EC.