Belowground competition occurs when plants decrease the growth, survival, or fecundity of neighbors by reducing available soil resources. Competition belowground can be stronger and involve many more neighbors than aboveground competition. Physiological ecologists and population or community ecologists have traditionally studied belowground competition from different perspectives. Physiological...

The onset of cravings for items not typically desired is often considered a hallmark of pregnancy. Given the ubiquity of cravings, this phenomenon remains surprisingly understudied. The current study tested four hypotheses of pregnancy food cravings: behavioural immune system, nutrient seeking, resource scarcity and social bargaining. The research took place in Tamil Nadu, South India, with pre...

Integrating microbial physiology and biomass stoichiometry opens far-reaching possibilities for linking microbial dynamics to ecosystem processes. For example, the growth-rate hypothesis (GRH) predicts positive correlations among growth rate, RNA content, and biomass phosphorus (P) content. Such relationships have been used to infer patterns of microbial activity, resource availability, and nut...

The importance of niche vs. neutral assembly mechanisms in structuring tropical tree communities remains an important unsettled question in community ecology [Bell G (2005) Ecology 86:1757-1770]. There is ample evidence that species distributions are determined by soils and habitat factors at landscape (<10(4) km(2)) and regional scales. At local scales (<1 km(2)), however, habitat factors and ...

Recent studies have provided evidence that trade-offs in biomass allocation, resource-use efficiency, and anti-herbivore defense influence seedling performance and distribution across soil types. Our previous research suggested that soil nutrient availability acted as a filter for understory palm community assembly and species coexistence in a lower montane forest in western Panama. Here, we ex...

When microbial strains compete for the same limiting nutrient in continuous culture, resource-based competition theory predicts that only one strain will survive and all others will die out. The surviving strain expected from theory will be the one with the smallest subsistence or "break-even" concentration of the limiting resource, a concentration defined by the J parameter. This prediction ha...

High-impact biological invasions often involve establishment and spread in disturbed, high-resource patches followed by establishment and spread in biotically or abiotically stressful areas. Evolutionary change may be required for the second phase of invasion (establishment and spread in stressful areas) to occur. When species have low genetic diversity and short selection history, within-gener...

One of the major challenges in ecological stoichiometry is to establish how environmental changes in resource availability may affect both the biochemical composition of organisms and the species composition of communities. This is a pressing issue in many coastal waters, where anthropogenic activities have caused large changes in riverine nutrient inputs. Here we investigate variation in the b...