Warming impairs trophic transfer efficiency in a long-term field experiment

Barneche, Diego R.; Hulatt, Chris J.; Dossena, Matteo; Padfield, Daniel; Woodward, Guy; Trimmer, Mark; Yvon‐Durocher, Gabriel

doi:10.1038/s41586-021-03352-2

Cited by 98 publications

(85 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…Our ndings have important implications for top predators, which are widely predicted to decline due to global warming 10,27 . Previous research in our study streams has shown that this is not necessarily the case and that larger organisms can thrive in warmer conditions if the production of resources is su cient to meet their higher energy demands 15,16 .…”

Section: Full Textmentioning

confidence: 84%

“…Furthermore, species may have the capacity to alter their metabolic traits through acclimation, evolutionary adaptation, or both [6][7][8][9] . This exibility in species-level thermal responses (which we refer to henceforth as "metabolic plasticity") should ultimately have consequences for ecosystem functioning by altering energy ow through the food web 10 , but evidence for such changes across species and trophic levels in natural systems is still lacking.…”

Section: Full Textmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, the scope for metabolic plasticity to increase energy ux from the base of the food web could help sustain large predators at higher trophic levels in the face of global warming. Understanding all these effects will require timescales of observation su cient to disentangle adaptation from acclimation via decadal-scale warming experiments 10,28 and meta-analyses of time series data that incorporate long-term temperature changes 29 . In the meantime, embedding metabolic plasticity in individual-to-ecosystem projections of climate change impacts may improve realism and help to account for some of the ecological surprises in response to warming that have been reported recently 10,15,16,25 .…”

Section: Full Textmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Metabolic plasticity can amplify ecosystem responses to global warming

Kordas

Pawar

Woodward

et al. 2021

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Organisms have the capacity to alter their physiological response to warming through acclimation or adaptation, but empirical evidence for this metabolic plasticity across species within food webs is lacking, and a generalisable framework does not exist for modelling its ecosystem-level consequences. Here we show that the ability of organisms to raise their metabolic rate following chronic exposure to warming decreases with increasing body size. Chronic exposure to higher temperatures also increases the sensitivity of organisms to short-term warming, irrespective of their body size. A mathematical model parameterised with these findings shows that metabolic plasticity could account for an additional 60% of ecosystem energy flux with just +2 °C of warming. This could explain why ecosystem respiration continues to rise in long-term warming experiments and highlights the need to embed metabolic plasticity in predictive models of global warming impacts on ecosystems.

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Section: Full Textmentioning

confidence: 84%

Section: Full Textmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Full Textmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Metabolic plasticity can amplify ecosystem responses to global warming

Kordas

Pawar

Woodward

et al. 2021

Preprint

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“…The strength of feeding interactions, in particular, increases with temperature, as feeding rates increase among consumers to compensate for increasing metabolic demands (Dell et al, 2011;Gillooly et al, 2001). Stronger predation in turn leads to declines in prey abundance and total biomass (Barneche et al, 2021;DeLong & Lyon, 2020;Garzke et al, 2019;Gilbert et al, 2014). Because gross respiration rates are determined by standing biomass, temperature effects on predation may ultimately influence ecosystem-level processes such as community respiration rates (O'Connor et al, 2009), and thus mediate the temperature response of microbial respiration rates worldwide.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predation by protists influences the temperature response of microbial communities

Rocca

Yammine

Simonin

et al. 2021

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Temperature strongly influences microbial community structure and function, which in turn contributes to the global carbon cycle that can fuel further warming. Recent studies suggest that biotic interactions amongst microbes may play an important role in determining the temperature responses of these communities. However, how microbial predation regulates these communities under future climates is still poorly understood. Here we assess whether predation by one of the most important bacterial consumers globally, protists, influences the temperature response of a freshwater microbial community structure and function. To do so, we exposed these microbial communities to two cosmopolitan species of protists at two different temperatures, in a month-long microcosm experiment. While microbial biomass and respiration increased with temperature due to shifts in microbial community structure, these responses changed over time and in the presence of protist predators. Protists influenced microbial biomass and function through effects on community structure, and predation actually reduced microbial respiration rate at elevated temperature. Indicator species and threshold indicator taxa analyses showed that these predation effects were mostly determined by phylum-specific bacterial responses to protist density and cell size. Our study supports previous findings that temperature is an important driver of microbial communities, but also demonstrates that predation can mediate these responses to warming, with important consequences for the global carbon cycle and future warming.

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“…Alternatively, warming can increase metabolic demands while reducing conversion efficiency (Barneche et al 2021), leading to predator starvation at high temperatures, loss of top predators, and reduced food chain length (Petchey et al 1999)Unlike warming, increasing nutrient loads tend to increase bottom-up effects, often resulting in unstable dynamics and species loss (i.e., paradox of enrichment, Rip and McCann, 2011;Rosenzweig, 1971). Increasing nutrient loads can alter consumer-resources interactions, sometimes resulting in top-heavy, unstable food webs (Rip & McCann 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Temperature and nutrients drive eco-phenotypic dynamics in a microbial food web

Han

Wieczynski

Yammine

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Anthropogenic increases in temperature and nutrient loads will likely impact food web structure and stability. Though their independent effects have been well studied, their joint effects-particularly on coupled ecological and phenotypic dynamics-remain poorly understood. Here we experimentally manipulated temperature and nutrient levels in microbial food webs and used time-series analysis to quantify the strength and causality of reciprocal effects between ecological and phenotypic dynamics across species. We found that i) temperature and nutrients have more complex effects on ecological dynamics at higher trophic levels, ii) temperature and nutrients interact antagonistically to shift the relative strength of top-down vs. bottom-up control, iii) phenotypic dynamics have stronger impacts on ecological dynamics than vice versa (especially at higher temperature), and iv) rapid phenotypic change mediates observed ecological responses to changes in temperature and nutrients. Our results expose how feedbacks between ecological and phenotypic dynamics mediate food web responses to environmental change.

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Warming impairs trophic transfer efficiency in a long-term field experiment

Cited by 98 publications

References 41 publications

Metabolic plasticity can amplify ecosystem responses to global warming

Metabolic plasticity can amplify ecosystem responses to global warming

Predation by protists influences the temperature response of microbial communities

Temperature and nutrients drive eco-phenotypic dynamics in a microbial food web

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