Life Sciences Commons^™

The Implications Of Eco-Evolutionary Processes For The Emergence Of Marine Plankton Community Biogeography, Boris Sauterey, Ben Ward, Jonathan Rault, Chris Bowler, David Claessen

Entomology Faculty Publications

Models of community assembly have been used to illustrate how the many functionally diverse species that compose plankton food webs can coexist. However, the evolutionary processes leading to the emergence of plankton food webs and their interplay with migratory processes and spatial heterogeneity are yet to be explored. We study the eco-evolutionary dynamics of a modeled plankton community structured in both size and space and physiologically constrained by empirical data. We demonstrate that a complex yet ecologically and evolutionarily stable size-structured food web can emerge from an initial set of two monomorphic phytoplankton and zooplankton populations. We also show that …