Journal
ECOLOGY LETTERS
Volume 20, Issue 9, Pages 1182-1191Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/ele.12815
Keywords
Carbon use efficiency; consumer; ecological stoichiometry; microbial biomass; nitrogen; nutrient limitation; phosphorus; stoichiometric model
Categories
Funding
- Bolin Centre for Climate Research through project 'Scaling carbon-use efficiency from the organism-to the global-scale'
- Swedish Research Council, Formas [2015-468]
- Swedish Research Council, VR [2016-04146]
- SoWa Research Infrastructure
- MEYS CZ grant [LM2015075]
- National Science Foundation Long-Term Ecological Research programme
- Swedish Research Council [2016-04146] Funding Source: Swedish Research Council
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Most heterotrophic organisms feed on substrates that are poor in nutrients compared to their demand, leading to elemental imbalances that may constrain their growth and function. Flexible carbon (C)-use efficiency (CUE, C used for growth over C taken up) can represent a strategy to reduce elemental imbalances. Here, we argue that metabolic regulation has evolved to maximise the organism growth rate along gradients of nutrient availability and translated this assumption into an optimality model that links CUE to substrate and organism stoichiometry. The optimal CUE is predicted to decrease with increasing substrate C-to-nutrient ratio, and increase with nutrient amendment. These predictions are generally confirmed by empirical evidence from a new database of c. 2200 CUE estimates, lending support to the hypothesis that CUE is optimised across levels of organisation (microorganisms and animals), in aquatic and terrestrial systems, and when considering nitrogen or phosphorus as limiting nutrients.
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