The maintenance of species diversity is a central focus in ecology. It is not rare to observe more species than the number of limiting resources, especially in plankton communities. However, such high species diversity is hard to achieve in theory under the competitive exclusion principles, known as the plankton paradox. Previous studies often focus on the coexistence of predefined species and ...

Stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes were used to obtain estimates of the contribution of natural and supplemental feeds to the nutrition of Oreochromis niloticus in ponds (free-swimming or caged) receiving different inputs in Sagana, Kenya. Three dietary treatments were employed in the pond study: 1) the test diet; 2) a pig finisher diet; and 3) a rice bran diet. Feeding rates and fertilization...

Three different lattice-based models for antagonistic ecological interactions, both nonlinear and stochastic, exhibit similar power-law scalings in the geometry of clusters. Specifically, cluster size distributions and perimeter-area curves follow power-law scalings. In the coexistence regime, these patterns are robust: their exponents, and therefore the associated Korcak exponent characterizin...

Recent behavior experiments have demonstrated that paddlefish can make use of stochastic resonance while feeding on Daphnia plankton. Here we calculate the information content of the noisy Daphnia signal at the paddlefish rostrum using an exact statistical treatment of threshold stochastic resonance as a minimal neural model. These calculations compare well with experimentally obtained data on ...

Introduction Conclusions References

To overcome sinking, plankton have devised various types of strategies. One is swimming, that is, an active, energy-consuming self-propulsion than can oppose gravitational sinking. Other phytoplankters can modify their buoyancy, becoming, at least for some time, positively buoyant. Others can exploit the turbulence in the mixed layer, using it to stay suspended for longer times. This latter opt...

The objective of the funded work is to quantify the contribution of ecological processes to patch formation in the coastal ocean. These objectives will be addressed by simultaneously quantify (1) spatial and temporal characteristics of large plankton patches, (2) the physical and chemical conditions these patches occur in and (3) the plankton population dynamics of the dominant layer forming sp...