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Ecosystems are inherently heterogeneous, with organisms distributed in an uneven manner due to physical and biological forces. Animals have evolved to exploit the “patchiness” of prey items to increase food consumption, yet the energetics associated with foraging in a patchy environment, along with the relationship between prey patches and consumer growth, is not fully understood. To explore how the patchiness of food influences consumer consumption and growth I devised a series of experiments measuring the energetic costs and benefits of Daphnia pulex foraging in different algal concentrations and conditions. Additionally, I compared the size at maturity of Daphnia pulex individuals raised in homogeneous distributions of food, and in two different magnitudes of temporally heterogeneous food at the same mean concentration. I will discuss the mechanisms by which feeding in prey patches is beneficial for Daphnia pulex, and why production estimates for aquatic ecosystems must be spatially explicit in order to be accurate.
Please join us in the AWESB for this exciting seminar series! For more information, contact
Dr. Andreas Luek at andreas.luek@uleth.ca or Dr. Alice Hontela at alice.hontela@uleth.ca
Free
Contact:
Andreas Luek | andreas.luek@uleth.ca
