Department Fish Ecology and Evolution

We work at the interfaces of food web ecology, ecosystem ecology, and ecophysiology to study how animals transport nutrients across ecosystem boundaries and how they cope with spatiotemporal nutrient variation. Animals play active roles in moving nutrients across ecosystem boundaries, serving as critical subsidies of inorganic nutrients, energy, and essential organic compounds like fatty acids. In addition to serving as conduits of nutrients, some animals also have the ability to alter the form of these organic nutrients through metabolic processes, allowing them to avoid organic nutrient limitation. We investigate how animals trade-off between using metabolic adaptations, such as synthesis or selective retention, or behavioral foraging strategies, like predation or nutrient-specific foraging, to avoid organic nutrient limitation. We also ask how global environmental change, particularly land use and climate change, is altering the nutritional landscape for animals ranging from aquatic insects to fish and riparian birds. 

Our team work to understand and predict the impacts of global change on food webs from a mechanistic ecophysiological perspective. We work along environmental gradients, including thermal and urbanization-based gradients, examining functional traits like nutrient synthesis capacity and phenology across communities as well as intra-specific variation in such traits at the level of populations. We also bring populations of animals from contrasting environmental conditions into a common garden in the lab in order to more mechanistically study how factors like temperature and food quality interact to influence nutritional and developmental physiology at the intra-specific level. Tools from biogeochemistry like fatty acid and compound-specific stable isotope analyses help us answer many of our questions in both the field and in the lab.  In addition, we often work with long-term data to examine both ecological and evolutionary effects of global change, such as rates of phenological advancement across trophic levels or changes in key functional and/or life history traits over time. 
 

Major themes

• Trophic Interactions
• Cross-Ecosystem Subsidies and Ecological Interactions
• Food Quality
• Ecophysiology
• Global Change