Rotifers with cyclical parthenogenesis produce resting eggs to cope with adverse environments. It is generally assumed that resting eggs remain in dormancy until the environment is suitable, and then the hatched stem females establish new populations through parthenogenetic reproduction. However, it has been noticed that some resting eggs hatch soon after being produced, known as early hatching phenomenon. It remains unclear if different hatching strategies may affect growth of the stem female's clone populations. This study investigated the effect of hatching strategy and food concentration on growth of the stem female's clone populations generated from strain D1 (strain with wide temperature niche) and H1 (strain with narrow temperature niche), of the rotifer Brachionus calyciflorus. We set two hatching strategies (early hatching (EH) vs. late hatching (LH)) and two food concentrations (high food concentration (HF, 2×10⁶ cells/mL) vs. low food concentration (LF, 5×10⁵ cells/mL))in the treatment, generated four experimental groups (LH-HF, LH-LF, EH-HF, and EH-LF) for each strain. Each experimental group included ten replicates. Two way ANOVA results showed that in D1 strain, hatching strategy and food concentration had significant impacts on the maximum population size (P=0.002), but there was no interaction between the two factors (P=0.911). The maximum population number of EH group was significantly higher than that of LH group (P=0.001). In H1 strain, the above two factors also showed significant influence on the maximum population number (P<0.001), but there existed interaction between the two factors (P<0.001). In HF groups that food concentration was not the limiting factor, the maximum population number of group EH was significantly lower than that of LH (P<0.001), which differed with D1. Under high food concentration, the population density threshold for trigging sexual reproduction in D1 EH group was significantly higher than that in LH group (P=0.041). In H1, however, it was on the contrary (P=0.022). In H1, the sexual reproduction rate under peak population density of EH group was significantly lower than that of LH group (P=0.044), while no such difference was observed in D1. In brief, hatching strategy of resting eggs affected growth of the stem female clone population in different ways, which may due to adaptation to their natural habitats.