Press Release on Most Recent Fish Pee Paper

Short article on Jake’s recent paper. Here is the full pdf (a pretty technical paper), and this paragraph from the paper summarizes the findings:

Animals are critical components of nutrient cycles in most ecosystems. Using a unique dataset from a diverse marine community, our analysis showed that individual level nutrient recycling was highly predictable based on body mass alone, but models were improved substantially when accounting for variation due to taxonomic identity. Surprisingly, neither body nutrient content nor relative trophic position substantially improved model performance, in contrast to the predictions of EST. These results suggest that, among individuals in a diverse community, variation in excretion rates is best explained simply by a combination of allometry and the taxonomic identity of the organism. Our results support theory that seeks to integrate MTE with EST to improve the predictability of material flow through ecosystems but highlights the need for further specificity regarding the unique effects certain species can have on ecological processes.

By Craig Layman| 2017-12-01T14:02:15-05:00 April 17th, 2015|Categories: Coral, Fish, Nutrients|0 Comments

About the Author: Craig Layman

My lab’s interdisciplinary pursuits provide for a multi-faceted understanding of environmental change in the coastal realm. We are ecologists, asking questions that span population, community, ecosystem and evolutionary sub-disciplines. We often use a food web based perspective, exploring top-down (e.g., predation) and bottom-up (e.g., nutrient excretion) mechanisms by which animals affect ecosystem processes. All of our efforts are framed within a broader outreach framework, directly integrating science and education, using approaches such as this website.