Flow-mediated responses to environmental change in suspension feeding animals.

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Suspension feeding animas are ubiquitous in aquatic habitats and exert major effects on aquatic ecosystems. This interdisciplinary project will use hydrodynamic theory as an explanatory tool to predict how organism size and the physical properties of water, such as temperature, may influence feeding by this key functional group in situations not addressed by current theory. The project involves integrating both experiment and modelling at the interface between ecology, engineering, and physics. Suspension feeding represents convergence in feeding structures and mode on a massive scale across almost all phyla, convergence that we are currently unable to explain because we lack knowledge of the basic physics involved in the feeding process.