Chemosynthesis influences food web and community structure in high-Arctic benthos

Exposing the structure of an Arctic food web

How food webs are structured has major implications for their stability and dynamics. While poorly studied to date, arctic food webs are commonly assumed to be simple in structure, with few links per species. If this is the case, then different parts of the web may be weakly connected to each other, with populations and species united by only a low number of links. We provide the first highly r...

Climate-driven regime shifts in Arctic marine benthos.

Climate warming can trigger abrupt ecosystem changes in the Arctic. Despite the considerable interest in characterizing and understanding the ecological impact of rapid climate warming in the Arctic, few long time series exist that allow addressing these research goals. During a 30-y period (1980-2010) of gradually increasing seawater temperature and decreasing sea ice cover in Svalbard, we doc...

Mercury Levels in an Arctic Marine Food Web

Species Invasion History Influences Community Evolution in a Tri-Trophic Food Web Model

BACKGROUND Recent experimental studies have demonstrated the importance of invasion history for evolutionary formation of community. However, only few theoretical studies on community evolution have focused on such views. METHODOLOGY AND PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We used a tri-trophic food web model to analyze the coevolutionary effects of ecological invasions by a mutant and by a predator and/or re...

Fluorinated organic compounds in an eastern Arctic marine food web.

An eastern Arctic marine food web was analyzed for perfluorooctanesulfonate (PFOS, C8F17SO3-), perfluorooctanoate (PFOA, C7F15COO-), perfluorooctane sulfonamide (PFOSA, C8F17SO2NH2), and N-ethylperfluorooctane sulfonamide (N-EtPFOSA, C8F17SO2NHCH2CH3) to examine the extent of bioaccumulation. PFOS was detected in all species analyzed, and mean concentrations ranged from 0.28 +/- 0.09 ng/g (arit...