Ecological stoichiometry in aquatic food webs: food quality and multitrophic interactions.

生态化学计量理论已成功地提高了我们对消费者和猎物之间的营养相互作用的理解。消费者和猎物的动态依赖于相对于消费者的营养需求的猎物的营养成分。然而，大多数关于这一主题的实验使用单一的消费者物种和非常简单的猎物社区。因此，知之甚少的有效性，营养相互作用的化学计量限制在更自然的食物网。该项目旨在通过测试消费者选择高质量食物的能力，解决食物质量在多物种浮游动物-浮游植物相互作用中的重要性，并通过调查不同浮游植物质量通过食草动物向捕食性浮游动物和鱼苗的传播，来提高我们对海洋中上层食物网营养限制的理解。这些方面将在微观和中观生态系统中进行实验分析，并从根本上提高我们预测沿海沃茨中生物地球化学变化对生态系统中营养转移的影响的能力。

The ecological stoichiometry theory has been successful in enhancing our understanding of trophic interactions between consumer and prey species. Consumer and prey dynamics depend on the nutrient composition of the prey relative to the nutrient demand of the consumer. However, most experiments on this topic used a single consumer species and very simple prey communities. Therefore, little is known about the validity of stoichiometric constraints on trophic interactions in more natural food webs. This project seeks to enhance our understanding of nutritional constraints in marine pelagic food webs by testing the consumer’s ability to select high quality food, by addressing the importance of food quality in multispecies zooplankton-phytoplankton interactions and by investigating the propagation of different phytoplankton quality via herbivores to predatory zooplankton and fish larvae. These aspects will be experimentally analysed in microcosms and mesocosms and fundamentally enhance our ability to predict the consequences of anthropogenically altered biogeochemistry in coastal waters on trophic transfer in ecosystems.