Increasing either temperature or nutrients can hurt ecosystems by destabilizing food webs, which are all of the interconnected food chains that make communities behave the way they do. When temperature and nutrients increase together, however, ecosystems sometimes behave in unexpected ways.
Increasing either temperature or nutrients can hurt ecosystems by destabilizing food webs, which are all of the interconnected food chains that make communities behave the way they do. When temperature and nutrients increase together, however, ecosystems sometimes behave in unexpected ways.
In a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, scientists studied a laboratory microbial food web that consisted of bacterial prey and protist predators. They found that changes in temperature and nutrients affect how microbial species’ abundances and average body sizes relate to each other. This work provides a new way of understanding changes in microbial communities in the face of rapid global warming and nutrient pollution.
