Abstract
Ecological stoichiometry has proven to be invaluable for understanding consumer response to changes in resource quality. Although interactions between trophic levels occur at the community level, most studies focus on single consumer species. In contrast to individual species, communities may deal with trophic mismatch not only through elemental plasticity but also through changes in species composition. Here, we show that a community of first-order consumers (e.g. zooplankton) is able to adjust its stoichiometry (C:P) in response to experimentally induced changes in resource quality, but only to a limited extent. Furthermore, using the Price equationframework we show the importance of both elemental plasticity and species sorting. These results illustrate the need for a community perspective in ecological stoichiometry, requiring consideration of species-specific elemental composition, intraspecific elemental plasticity and species turnover.
Highlights
Several main drivers of global change, such as eutrophication and increasing atmospheric CO2-concentrations, result in strong alterations of the amounts and ratios of essential elements available to ecosystems (Falkowski et al 2000; Van De Waal et al 2010)
The increase in seston C:P with light was stronger under conditions of low compared to high P availability: under HP conditions, molar seston C:P increased from 135 to 189 with increasing light, whereas under LP conditions, seston C:P increased from 295 to 677
C. sphaericus S. mucronata idea is confirmed by the results of our Price-based analysis which demonstrated a relatively large impact of compositional shifts on community C:P (CDEn components in Figs 3c and 4c) relative to phenotypic elemental plasticity of its constituent species (CDEp components in Figs 3c and 4c)
Summary
Several main drivers of global change, such as eutrophication and increasing atmospheric CO2-concentrations, result in strong alterations of the amounts and ratios of essential elements available to ecosystems (Falkowski et al 2000; Van De Waal et al 2010). High stoichiometric flexibility of producers may affect a variety of stoichiometry-regulated ecosystem functions, such as biogeochemical cycling and carbon sequestration (Mack et al 2004; Dickman et al 2006; Sistla et al 2013) For this reason, there has been a long tradition of research on aspects of producer stoichiometric plasticity, including its main drivers (Goldman et al 1979; Klausmeier et al 2004) and potential ecosystem consequences (Sterner et al 1997; Dickman et al 2006; van Donk et al 2008; Mette et al 2011; Sardans et al 2012; Sistla & Schimel 2012; Plum et al 2015)
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