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Forty
meters below the high canopy of the forest on Barro Colorado Island
Panama, amidst the fallen leaves and branches, lies the brown food
web. Unlike the monkeys and grasshoppers in the treetops that devour
green leaves, the mites and springtails that number in the thousands
in a m2 of litter consume
the fungi and bacteria that decompose the forest litter. The vast majority of
the species in these webs are unknown to science. Intriguingly, patches of
litter vary a hundred-fold in the number of tiny invertebrates that make up
these webs. Thus tropical brown food webs are one of ecology’s last frontiers.
To explore these frontiers, we will collect litter and use simple experiments
to test the following hypotheses:
1) that the control of the biomass of
trophic levels (e.g., fungi, microbivores, microbivore predators, predators of
those predators) in a litter patch varies with the quantity and
chemical makeup of the litter;
2) that this chemical makeup varies predictably
between the trees that generate the litter and the fungi that decompose it;
and
3) that the fungal and microbivore defenses against
their predators varies with their vulnerability and the availability
of chemicals to build those defenses.
More information on our
current
NSF-funded project.
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