Stoichiometric mismatch causes a warming-induced regime shift in experimental plankton communities.

ABSTRACT: In many ecosystems, consumers respond to warming differently than their resources, sometimes leading to temporal mismatches between seasonal maxima in consumer demand and resource availability. A potentially equally pervasive, but less acknowledged threat to the temporal coherence of consumer-resource interactions is mismatch in food quality. Many plant and algal communities respond to warming with shifts toward more carbon-rich species and growth forms, thereby diluting essential elements in their biomass and intensifying the stoichiometric mismatch with herbivore nutrient requirements. Here we report on a mesocosm experiment on the spring succession of an assembled plankton community in which we manipulated temperature (ambient vs. +3.6°C) and presence versus absence of two types of graz

SUBMITTER: Diehl S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9285514 | biostudies-literature | 2022 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature