Darwin Project study led by Jonathan Lauderdale finds Earth’s oceans contain just the right amount of iron; adding more may not improve their ability to absorb carbon dioxide. Continue reading Seeding Oceans with Iron may not Impact Climate Change
Category Archives: Top-Down Control
Ruifeng Zhang, Rachel L. Kelly, Kathryn M. Kauffman, Amber K. Reid, Jonathan M. Lauderdale, Michael J. Follows, Seth G. John (2019), Growth of marine Vibrio in oligotrophic environments is not stimulated by the addition of inorganic iron, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, doi: 10.1016/j.epsl.2019.04.002 Continue reading Growth of marine Vibrio in oligotrophic environments is not stimulated by the addition of inorganic iron
Phytoplankton & Chips
Helen Hill | Darwin Project
Microbes mediate the global marine cycles of elements, modulating atmospheric CO2 and helping to maintain the oxygen we all breath yet there is much about them scientists still don’t understand. Now, an award from the Simons Foundation will give researchers from the Darwin Project access to bigger, better computing resources to model these communities and probe how they work. Continue reading Phytoplankton & Chips
Darwin goes to Ocean Sciences 2014
Leaving the cold of a New England February behind, the Darwin team will be in full attendance at this year’s Ocean Sciences conference taking place February 23-28 in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Size Structure: exploring nutrient versus grazing control
Idealized equilibrium models have attributed the observed size structure of marine communities to the interactions between nutrient and grazing control. In a new paper in the Journal of Plankton Research Ben Ward and co-authors Stephanie Dutkiewicz and Mick Follows examine this theory in a more realistic context using a size-structured global ocean food-web model, together with a much simplified version of the same model for which equilibrium solutions are readily obtained.
Continue reading Size Structure: exploring nutrient versus grazing control
Publication
Ward, B.A., S. Dutkiewicz, and M.J. Follows (2014) Modelling spatial and temporal patterns in size-structured marine plankton communities: top-down and bottom-up controls, Journal of Plankton Research, 0, 1-17, doi:10.1093/plankt/fbt097
Publication
Ward, B.A., S. Dutkiewicz, and M.J. Follows (2013), Top-down and bottom-up controls in a global size-structured plankton food-web model, Journal of Plankton Research , 0, 1-17, doi: 10.1093/plankt/fbt097
The dynamics of dining in an all-you-can-eat-phytoplankton buffet
Predators’ switching towards the most abundant prey is a mechanism that stabilizes population dynamics and helps overcome competitive exclusion of species in food webs. However, current formulations of active prey-switching in marine ecosystem models display non-maximal feeding; the total ingestion of prey by predators decays exponentially with the number of prey species even though the total prey biomass stays constant.
Continue reading The dynamics of dining in an all-you-can-eat-phytoplankton buffet
Publication:
Vallina, S. M. , B. A. Ward, S. Dutkiewicz, and M. J. Follows (2013), Maximal feeding with active prey-switching: a kill-the-winner functional response and its effect on global diversity and biogeography, Progress in Oceanography, 120, 93–109, doi: 10.1016/j.pocean.2013.08.001
Publication
Prowe, A. E. F., M. Pahlow, S. Dutkiewicz, M. Follows, and A. Oschlies (2012), Top-down control of marine phytoplankton diversity in a global ecosystem model, Progr. Oceanogr., doi:10.1016/j.pocean.2011.11.016