Analysis of Plankton Populations

I use numerical and analytical techniques to study the dynamics of various models of plankton food webs with and without resource fluctuations. Plankton are ideal organisms because they are very small, fast-reproducing organisms so they can easily be used in laboratory experiments to verify any results. We can study simple food webs to develop a better understanding of more complex food webs. The three archetypical food webs are a single grazer with a resource (growth), multiple grazers with a common resource (competition), and one grazer and one predator with a base resource (predator-prey). 1 Background Plankton are microbial organisms that live in aquatic environments. There are two types of plankton: phytoplankton and zooplankton. Phytoplankton are autotrophic organisms that use photosynthesis to generate their own food from sunlight, water, and various nutrients. Zooplankton are heterotrophic organisms that use phytoplankton as food sources themselves [2]. To understand the dynamics of the phytoplankton-zooplankton systems, one could use the analogy of self-sustaining plants and the animals that graze on them. In 1961, Hutchinson presented the paradox of the plankton: ”The problem that is presented by the phytoplankton is essentially how it is possible for a number of species to coexist in a relatively isotropic or unstructured environment all competing for the same sorts of materials [1]”. Hutchinson hypothesized that different species of plankton can coexist if they exploited differences in other factors, such as efficiency of resource consumption under different levels of resources.