MesopTroph, a database of trophic parameters to study interactions in mesopelagic food webs

Abstract

Mesopelagic organisms play a crucial role in marine food webs, channelling energy across the predator-prey network and connecting depth strata through their diel vertical migrations. The information available to assess mesopelagic feeding interactions and energy transfer has increased substantially in recent years, owing to the growing interest and research activity in the mesopelagic realm. However, such data have not been systematically collated and are difficult to access, hampering estimation of the contribution of mesopelagic organisms to marine ecosystems. Here we present MesopTroph, a georeferenced database of diet, trophic markers, and energy content of mesopelagic and other marine taxa compiled from 203 published and non-published sources. MesopTroph currently includes data on stomach contents, carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes, major and trace elements, energy density, fatty acids, trophic positions, and diet proportion estimates for 498 species/genera. MesopTroph will be expanded with new data emerging from ongoing studies. MesopTroph provides a unique tool to investigate trophic interactions and energy flow mediated by mesopelagic organisms, and to evaluate the ecosystem services of this community.

Predicting ecosystem metaphenome from community metagenome: A grand challenge for environmental biology

“…One ATN module may determine network structure from empirical observations assisted by the probabilistic niche model (Williams et al, 2010) and other statistical approaches (Young et al, 2021) to link uncertainty. Another module parameterizes the equations with metabolic and consumption rates again either specifically from empirical observations or from those allometrically derived from the metabolic theory of ecology (Brose et al, 2017; Martinez, 2020; Silva et al, 2022). A third module runs the simulations with a 1‐day time step in contrast to the 1‐second time step of whole‐cell models.…”