Thermal acclimation increases the stability of a predator-prey interaction in warmer environments.

Global warming over the next century is likely to alter the energy demands of consumers and thus the strengths of their interactions with their resources. The subsequent cascading effects on population biomasses could have profound effects on food web stability. One key mechanism by which organisms can cope with a changing environment is phenotypic plasticity, such as acclimation to warmer conditions through reversible changes in their physiology. Here, we measured metabolic rates and functional responses in laboratory experiments for a widespread predator-prey pair of freshwater invertebrates, sampled from across a natural stream temperature gradient in Iceland (4-18℃). This enabled us to parameterize a Rosenzweig-MacArthur population dynamical model to study the effect of thermal acclimation on the persistence of the predator-prey pairs in response to warming. Acclimation to higher temperatures either had neutral effects or reduced the thermal sensitivity of both metabolic and feeding rates for the predator, increasing its energetic efficiency. This resulted in greater stability of population dynamics, as acclimation to higher temperatures increased the biomass of both predator and prey populations with warming. These findings indicate that phenotypic plasticity can act as a buffer against the impacts of environmental warming. As a consequence, predator-prey interactions between ectotherms may be less sensitive to future warming than previously expected, but this requires further investigation across a broader range of interacting species

Fit, efficiency, and biology: Some thoughts on judging food web models

Revealing the processes that determine who eats whom, and there by the structure of food webs,is a long running challenge in ecological research. Recent advances include development of new methods for measuring fit of models to observed food webdata,and there by testing which are the‘best’ food web models. The best model could be considered the most efficient with relatively few parameters and high explanatory power. Another recent advance involves adding some additional biology to food web models in the form of foraging theory based on maximisation of energy intake as the predictor of species’ diets in food webs. While it is interesting to compare efficiency among food web models,we believe that such comparisons at least should be interpreted with caution,since they do not account for any differences in motivation, formulation, and potential that might also exist among models. Furthermore,we see an important but somewhat neglected role for experimental tests of models of food web structure

Ecological stability in response to warming

That species' biological rates including metabolism, growth and feeding scale with temperature is well established from warming experiments(1). The interactive influence of these changes on population dynamics, however, remains uncertain. As a result, uncertainty about ecological stability in response under warming remains correspondingly high. In previous studies, severe consumer extinction waves in warmed microcosms(2) were explained in terms of warming-induced destabilization of population oscillations(3). Here, we show that warming stabilizes predator-prey dynamics at the risk of predator extinction. Our results are based on meta-analyses of a global database of temperature effects on metabolic and feeding rates and maximum population size that includes species of different phylogenetic groups and ecosystem types. To unravel population-level consequences we parameterized a bioenergetic predator-prey model(4) and simulated warming effects within ecological, non-evolutionary timescales. In contrast to previous studies(3), we find that warming stabilized population oscillations up to a threshold temperature, which is true for most of the possible parameter combinations. Beyond the threshold level, warming caused predator extinction due to starvation. Predictions were tested in a microbial predator-prey system. Together, our results indicate a major change in how we expect climate change to alter natural ecosystems: warming should increase population stability while undermining species diversity

Dimensionality of consumer search space drives trophic interaction strengths

Trophic interactions govern biomass fluxes in ecosystems, and stability in food webs. Knowledge of how trophic interaction strengths are affected by differences among habitats is crucial for understanding variation in ecological systems. Here we show how substantial variation in consumption-rate data, and hence trophic interaction strengths, arises because consumers tend to encounter resources more frequently in three dimensions (3D) (for example, arboreal and pelagic zones) than two dimensions (2D) (for example, terrestrial and benthic zones). By combining new theory with extensive data (376 species, with body masses ranging from 5.24 × 10⁻¹⁴ kg to 800 kg), we find that consumption rates scale sublinearly with consumer body mass (exponent of approximately 0.85) for 2D interactions, but superlinearly (exponent of approximately 1.06) for 3D interactions. These results contradict the currently widespread assumption of a single exponent (of approximately 0.75) in consumer–resource and food-web research. Further analysis of 2,929 consumer–resource interactions shows that dimensionality of consumer search space is probably a major driver of species coexistence, and the stability and abundance of populations