Latest food web Stories
National Science Foundation In one drop of water are found all the secrets of all the oceans. --- Kahlil Gibran What do a pond or a lake and a carnivorous pitcher plant have in common? The water-filled pool within a pitcher plant, it turns out, is a tiny ecosystem whose inner workings are similar to those of a full-scale water body. Whether small carnivorous plant or huge lake, both are subject to the same ecological "tipping points," of concern on Earth Day--and every day, say...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online At first glance, pitcher plants appear to be simple carnivorous plants that entrap and digest hapless insects that fall into them. However, a closer look reveals a complex food web of fly larvae, rotifers, midge larvae, and bacteria that exist within the plants’ pitcher. According to a new study by Harvard University, the predator-prey interactions among pitcher plant inhabitants provide an ideal model for understanding food webs on...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A mass extinction, wiping out numerous species including the dinosaurs, marked the end of the Cretaceous Period. A new study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), reveals that the structure of North American ecosystems made the extinction worse than it might have been. Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula is home to the now-buried Chicxulub impact crater, caused by a mountain-sized asteroid. This impact is...
The cataclysmic events that marked the end of the Permian Period some 252 million years ago were a watershed moment in the history of life on Earth. As much as 90 percent of ocean organisms were extinguished, ushering in a new order of marine species, some of which we still see today. But while land dwellers certainly sustained major losses, the extent of extinction and the reshuffling afterward were less clear. In a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B,...
Scientists have known for two decades that sulfur compounds that are produced by bacterioplankton as they consume decaying algae in the ocean cycle through two paths. In one, a sulfur compound dimethylsulfide, or DMS, goes into the atmosphere, where it leads to water droplet formation "“ the basis of clouds that cool the Earth. In the other, a sulfur compound goes into the ocean's food web, where it is eaten and returned to seawater.What they haven't known is how sulfur is routed one way or...
Sea-ice algae "“ the important first rung of the food web each spring in places like the Arctic Ocean "“ can engineer ice to its advantage, according to the first published findings about this ability.The same gel-like mucus secreted by sea-ice algae as a kind of antifreeze against temperatures well below minus 10 C is also allowing algae to sculpt microscopic channels and pores in ice that are hospitable to itself and other microorganisms.Altering ice to their benefit should help sea-ice...
The most widely adopted measure for assessing the state of the world's oceans and fisheries led to inaccurate conclusions in nearly half the ecosystems where it was applied according to new analysis by an international team led by a University of Washington fisheries scientist."Applied to individual ecosystems it's like flipping a coin, half the time you get the right answer and half the time you get the wrong answer," said Trevor Branch, a UW assistant professor of aquatic and...
Scientists have tracked how certain nontoxic elements of oil from the BP spill quickly entered the food web in the Gulf of Mexico. The new study suggests the 172 million-gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf in April have become food for plankton. "Everybody is making a huge deal of where did the oil go," chief study author William "Monty" Graham, a plankton expert at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama, told the Associated Press (AP). "It just became food."The...
People who fish for a living pursue top profits, not necessarily top predators, according to the first-ever analysis of worldwide catch and economic data for the past 55 years.This differs from the observation raised 10 years ago that humans were "fishing down" the food web. It was assumed that catches of the predators at the top of the food chain, such as halibut and tuna, were declining after fishers started landing more fish from lower on the food chain, such as herring and...
Study suggests pollution reductions could help restoration effortsA new study to be published in the academic journal Reviews in Fisheries Science recommends that efforts to restore the endangered California delta smelt and other declining pelagic fish should more sharply focus on reducing nutrient pollution to the species' native waters. The research indicates these fish populations would greatly benefit from reductions in the amount of nitrogen flowing into the Sacramento-San Joaquin...
