Stoichiometry and metabolic ecology of lake ecosystems

水产消费者与其食物之间的营养失衡会严重影响湖泊和溪流的食物网动态和生态系统过程。水生食物网中食物质量的重要性仍然存在争议，部分原因是很难确定消费者分类群中营养限制的频率和严重程度。此外，以前的研究通常集中在相当短的时间范围内的一组有限的响应变量(例如增长率)上。在本项目中，我将使用新兴的分子工具及其生化类似物来研究水生无脊椎动物在不同时间尺度上对营养限制的代谢和生理反应。我将结合这些研究来评估居住在安大略省中南部湖泊中的水生无脊椎动物的营养限制的类型、频率和严重程度。我计划通过研究饮食质量如何影响宿主和寄生虫的相互作用，进一步研究营养不良的生态后果。该项目的最后一个组成部分将测量湖泊食物网的元素组成，因为它们与环境驱动因素有关。这项工作将提高我们对动物营养及其对加拿大水生生态系统的生态意义的理解。

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.