Journal
ECOLOGY LETTERS
Volume 21, Issue 9, Pages 1440-1452Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/ele.13122
Keywords
Bottom-up control; competition; Keystone predator; Killing the Winner; microbial diversity; microbial food webs; predation; resource partitioning; top-down control
Categories
Funding
- European Commission through project OCEAN-CERTAIN [603773]
- Research Council of Norway [225956/E10]
- University of Bergen
Ask authors/readers for more resources
In food webs, interactions between competition and defence control the partitioning of limiting resources. As a result, simple models of these interactions contain links between biogeochemistry, diversity, food web structure and ecosystem function. Working at hierarchical levels, these mechanisms also produce self-similarity and therefore suggest how complexity can be generated from repeated application of simple underlying principles. Reviewing theoretical and experimental literature relevant to the marine photic zone, we argue that there is a wide spectrum of phenomena, including single cell activity of prokaryotes, microbial biodiversity at different levels of resolution, ecosystem functioning, regional biogeochemical features and evolution at different timescales; that all can be understood as variations over a common principle, summarised in what has been termed the Killing-the-Winner' (KtW) motif. Considering food webs as assemblages of such motifs may thus allow for a more integrated approach to aquatic microbial ecology.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available