We can't find the internet
Attempting to reconnect
Something went wrong!
Hang in there while we get back on track
Contrasting effects of producer and consumer resource use efficiency on trophic asynchrony and stability of food web under multiple stressors
AI summary Read the abstract
A six-month mesocosm experiment exposed freshwater food webs to multiple simultaneous stressors — including microplastics, nutrient pollution, dissolved organic carbon, and invasive fish — and found that microplastics and other stressors reduced phytoplankton diversity and food web stability through complex pathways involving how efficiently organisms use resources. Notably, greater producer diversity did not always stabilize consumer communities, challenging the assumption that biodiversity uniformly buffers ecosystems. This highlights that microplastic pollution, combined with other human pressures, can destabilize aquatic food webs in ways that simple single-stressor studies would miss.
The ongoing global biodiversity loss caused by multi-stressors has raised concerns about the potential consequences of species extinctions on the functionality and stability of ecosystems. It has been widely recognized that biodiversity could stabilize the ecosystem by enhancing the asynchronous dynamics among species within a single trophic level. However, in natural multi-trophic ecosystems, asynchronous changes between trophic levels (trophic asynchrony) are expected to increase trophic mismatch and alter trophic interactions, which may consequently alter ecosystem stability. Under changeable environments, it is currently unclear how biodiversity in different trophic levels affects the stability of food web by changing the trophic interactions (represented by resource use efficiency, RUE) and trophic asynchrony, which is key to providing further insights into the biodiversity effects on ecosystem stability. Using a 6-month mesocosm experiment, we tested how multi-stressors—microplastics, eutrophication, dissolved organic carbon, and invasive fish—affected species richness and RUE of phytoplankton (producer) and zooplankton (consumer), subsequently influencing temporal stability of food web via altering the trophic asynchrony. Our results demonstrated that multi-stressors could shape ecosystem temporal stability through species richness-RUE-trophic asynchrony pathways, emphasizing the cascading impacts of multi-stressors on ecosystem functions and stability. Increasing species diversity of phytoplankton and zooplankton enhanced the RUE within that trophic level. However, greater producer diversity decreased RUE of consumers, probably due to an increase in inedible producer species. This suggests that benefits of biodiversity of producer could diminish functions at higher trophic levels. In addition, zooplankton RUE increased trophic asynchrony, whereas phytoplankton RUE decreased it. Crucially, trophic asynchrony stabilized phytoplankton and food web but destabilized zooplankton community, highlighting contrasting impacts of trophic asynchrony on stability across trophic levels. Our study showed that producer diversity may indirectly decrease the functions and stability of consumers under multiple stressors, which challenged the simplistic expectation that more diversity universally stabilized ecosystems. This study provided a new insight into the biodiversity-ecosystem stability relationships by highlighting the mediating roles of RUE and trophic asynchrony under realistic environmental change scenarios.
More Papers Like This
Contrasting effects of producer and consumer resource use efficiency on trophic asynchrony and stability of food web under multiple stressors
AI summary Read the abstract
A six-month mesocosm experiment showed that multiple stressors—including microplastics, eutrophication, dissolved organic carbon, and invasive fish—destabilize aquatic food webs by altering species richness and resource use efficiency at both producer and consumer trophic levels. The findings reveal that microplastics contribute to cascading ecosystem instability by disrupting trophic synchrony between phytoplankton and zooplankton communities.
Dissolved organic carbon and microplastics decrease the biodiversity effect on resource use efficiency of crustacean zooplankton
AI summary Read the abstract
Researchers investigated how dissolved organic carbon and microplastics affect the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in crustacean zooplankton communities. The study found that both pollutants diminish the positive effects that species and functional diversity normally have on resource use efficiency, suggesting that environmental contamination can undermine ecosystem resilience.
Comparing effects of microplastic exposure, FPOM resource quality, and consumer density on the response of a freshwater particle feeder and associated ecosystem processes
AI summary Read the abstract
Researchers found that realistic microplastic concentrations had minimal direct effects on freshwater particle feeders compared to the much stronger influences of food resource quality and consumer density on growth, survival, and ecosystem processes in stream microcosms.
Microplastic and drought influence the positive effect of plant diversity on plant biomass production
AI summary Read the abstract
Researchers conducted a glasshouse experiment examining how microplastic pollution interacts with drought to affect plant biomass production across a gradient of plant diversity, finding that microplastics influenced the positive biodiversity-productivity relationship. The study reveals that microplastic pollution is a novel stressor that interacts with drought to affect terrestrial ecosystem functionality in ways not predictable from single-factor experiments.
High invader density alone drives invasive plant dominance, but its impacts on native community biomass and diversity depend on nutrients and microplastics
AI summary Read the abstract
A mesocosm experiment using invasive aquatic plants found that high invader density is the main driver of invasive species dominance in freshwater systems, but the impact on native plant diversity and productivity depends on whether the water is also enriched with nutrients or contaminated with microplastics. This study highlights that microplastic pollution can interact with other stressors like nutrient runoff to shape how biological invasions unfold in freshwater ecosystems, with cascading consequences for native plant communities.
Research digests by email
When a large batch of papers lands in the Atlas, we read through it and send a short write-up of what stood out.