Mechanisms terminating phytoplankton blooms are often not well understood. Potentially involved processes such as consumption by grazers, flocculation, and viral lysis each have different post-bloom consequences on the processing of the organic …
Marine dissolved organic matter (DOM) contains more carbon than the combined stocks of Earth’s biota. Organisms in the ocean continuously release a myriad of molecules that become food for microheterotrophs, but, for unknown reasons, a residual …
Predator–prey cycles rank among the most fundamental concepts in ecology, are predicted by the simplest ecological models and enable, theoretically, the indefinite persistence of predator and prey. However, it remains an open question for how long cyclic dynamics can be self-sustained in real communities. Field observations have been restricted to a few cycle periods and experimental studies indicate that oscillations may be short-lived without external stabilizing factors. Here we performed microcosm experiments with a planktonic predator–prey system and repeatedly observed oscillatory time series of unprecedented length that persisted for up to around 50 cycles or approximately 300 predator generations.
1. Global concern about human impact on biological diversity has triggered an intense research agenda on drivers and consequences of biodiversity change in parallel with international policy seeking to conserve biodiversity and associated ecosystem …
Two ecological frameworks have been used to explain multitrophic interactions, but rarely in combination: (i) ecological stoichiometry (ES), explaining consumption rates in response to consumers' demand and prey's nutrient content; and (ii) metabolic …
Species within a habitat are not uniformly distributed. However this aspect of community structure, which is fundamental to many conservation activities, is neglected in the majority of models of food web assembly. To address this issue, we introduce …