Research
Every organism consumes energy and resources to live, grow and reproduce. These transformations of energy move through populations and communities, fueling biological production and ecosystem processes such as the production of oxygen and the cycling of carbon.
The aim of the Functional Ecology group is to explore how the environment (ecological context) regulates the rate at which organisms use energy and to identify general rules for how organismal processes scale up to determine the functioning of ecosystems. We are particularly interested in understanding how interactions between and within species affect energy fluxes.
We combine experimental manipulations of multi-species communities with high-throughput phenotyping of individual organisms to study the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that influence energy fluxes at different scales of biological organization. Our main model organisms are marine phytoplankton — tiny algae that are key players in ocean productivity and carbon uptake.
The aim of the Functional Ecology group is to explore how the environment (ecological context) regulates the rate at which organisms use energy and to identify general rules for how organismal processes scale up to determine the functioning of ecosystems. We are particularly interested in understanding how interactions between and within species affect energy fluxes.
We combine experimental manipulations of multi-species communities with high-throughput phenotyping of individual organisms to study the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that influence energy fluxes at different scales of biological organization. Our main model organisms are marine phytoplankton — tiny algae that are key players in ocean productivity and carbon uptake.
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How does competition affect organismal metabolism?
Energy use often varies widely among individuals of the same species and size. Some of this variation can be explained by differences in population densities because organisms typically reduce metabolism in crowded conditions. But what drives metabolic suppression and what are its fitness consequences? Food certainly plays a role but we have discovered that cues from conspecifics reduce metabolism even when resources are abundant. We are currently exploring similar and other mechanisms of metabolic regulation in phytoplankton, including the longer term effects of competition on the evolution of metabolic traits. Understanding these mechanisms helps us predicting how populations grow because metabolism affects the ability of an organism to compete and reproduce. Example papers: Lovass et al. 2020, Ghedini et al. 2017, Nørgaard et al. 2020 Photo: Phaeodactylum tricornutum by Moritz Klaassen. |
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Can we scale up species to community metabolism?
The metabolism of organisms scales predictably with size for many species. So theory predicts that we could infer the metabolism of an entire community based on the scaling of metabolism with size for the species in this community. When we tested these predictions, we found that metabolism-size relationships at the level of organisms do not always correctly predict the rates of entire communities. We are now studying metabolic plasticity in individual organisms and its density regulation to explain patterns of metabolic scaling and growth in whole communities. By doing so, we aim to find general principles for how density-dependent processes affect organismal metabolism and, in turn, the productivity and stability of communities. Example papers: Ghedini et al. 2020, Ghedini et al. 2018, Ghedini et al. 2016 |
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What are the temporal patterns of energy use in communities?
In the 1960s, ecologists made predictions for how fluxes of energy and resources should change over time in communities (e.g., Odum and MacArthur's work). But directly estimating energy fluxes on entire communities was not feasible for many systems so their predictions have remained largely untested. We leverage high-throughput technologies that allow us to measure changes in resource use, metabolic costs and efficiency of whole communities over time to determine how these fluxes vary with respect to the strength of competition, biodiversity and disturbance. Example papers: Ghedini et al. 2022, Ghedini et al. 2020, Ghedini et al. 2018 |
The lab is supported by a fellowship from ”la Caixa” Foundation and from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 847648.
