Stoichiometry and metabolic ecology of lake ecosystems

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Nutritional imbalances between aquatic consumers and their food can strongly affect food web dynamics and ecosystem processes in lakes and streams. The importance of food quality in aquatic food webs remains debatable due, in part, to the difficulty of determining the frequency and severity of nutrient limitation in consumer taxa. In addition, previous research has typically focused on a limited set of response variables (e.g., growth rate) across fairly short time scales. In this project, I will use newly emerging molecular tools and their biochemical analogs to study the metabolic and physiological responses of aquatic invertebrates to nutrient limitation at different time scales. I will couple these studies to work assessing the type, frequency, and severity of nutritional limitation of aquatic invertebrates residing in south central Ontario lakes. I plan to further examine the ecological consequences of poor nutrition with studies examining the how diet quality affects host-parasite interactions. A final component of this project will measure the element composition of lake food webs as they relate to environmental drivers. This work will improve our understanding of animal nutrition and its ecological significance to the aquatic ecosystems of Canada.