In lakes and reservoirs in which Daphnia is able to suppress the biomass of edible algae far below the level set by nutrients, the interaction is stable across the range of nutrient-poor to nutrient-rich environments. This phenomenon contradicts standard consumer–resource models, which predict that dynamics should become increasingly unstable with enrichment. We test four hypotheses that might ...

• Plant resource-use traits are generally hypothesized to be adaptively differentiated for populations distributed along resource gradients. Although nutrient limitations are expected to select for resource-conservative strategies, water limitations may select for either resource-conservative or -acquisitive strategies. We test whether population differentiation reflects local adaptation for tr...

BACKGROUND Theory predicts that plant species win competition for a shared resource by more quickly preempting the resource in hotspots and by depleting resource levels to lower concentrations than its competitors. Competition in natural grasslands largely occurs belowground, but information regarding root interactions is limited, as molecular methods quantifying species abundance belowground h...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Mediterranean woody plants have a wide variety of phenological strategies. Some authors have classified the Mediterranean phanaerophytes into two broad phenological categories: phenophase-overlappers (that overlap resource-demanding activities in a short period of the year) and phenophase-sequencers (that protract resource-demanding activities throughout the year). In this w...

Many physiological processes in phytoplankton, including nutrient uptake, vary on a number of temporal scales. Experiments show that the daily cycle in irradiance affects nutrient uptake rates. We used a Droop-based model of resource competition to investigate how diel variability in nutrient uptake influences phytoplankton competition and community structure. The analytical approximation we de...

Increase of phenolic secondary metabolites, phlorotannins, in brown algae due to gastropod grazing has been interpreted as an anti-herbivore adaptation. Here we tested whether such a response could be due to changes in truly available resources for the alga, not by the grazing activity of snails as such. We allowed two species of snails, Theodoxus flu iatilis and Physa fontinalis to graze on Fu...

We introduce nutrient recycling into a model where competitors differ in the scale at which they perceive their environment. In a two-resource system with both external nutrient inputs and recycling, larger consumers ("integrators") often generate resource distributions that favor their smaller ("nonintegrator") competitors, and vice versa. This occurs because recycling of integrator biomass re...

Mitigating the global expansion of cyanobacterial harmful blooms (CyanoHABs) is a major challenge facing researchers and resource managers. A variety of traditional (e.g., nutrient load reduction) and experimental (e.g., artificial mixing and flushing, omnivorous fish removal) approaches have been used to reduce bloom occurrences. Managers now face the additional effects of climate change on wa...

The elaboration of exaggerated, sexually selected weapons and ornaments often comes at a cost to other traits. For instance, by sustaining the growth of an exaggerated weapon during development, shared and limited resources such as morphogens, growth factors, and nutrients may become depleted and limit the size to which other structures can grow. Such interactions are characteristic of resource...