Postdoctoral Fellowship: PRFB: Consequences of variation across scales: bioenergetics and behavior from phenotypes to ecosystems

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2024, Integrative Research Investigating the Rules of Life Governing Interactions Between Genomes, Environment, and Phenotypes. The fellowship supports research and training of the fellow that will contribute to the area of Rules of Life in innovative ways. Diverse organisms – from tiny microbes, to larger plants and animals – vary remarkably in body form and lifestyle.

Surprisingly, simple rules, such as “allometric scaling laws”, can explain much of this variation. On average, metabolism, growth, feeding rates, and other traits scale predictably with organismal body size. Yet, there is variation not described by allometric scaling that represents adaptations to special ecological conditions.

Fast-paced organisms have higher metabolisms relative to their size and therefore tend to have riskier and more aggressive behaviors when hunting because they need more food, while slow-paced organisms have behaviors to reduce activity and avoid predators. However, the extent to which this ‘pace of life’ affects predator-prey interactions, food webs, or ecosystems is unknown.

This project will develop rules of life for how fast-slow variation affects ecological dynamics across spatial and biological scales using theoretical models and activity data from fish, mammals, and insects. The results will improve the predictive ability of population and food web models, including those used to manage commercial, recreational, and indigenous fisheries.

The fellow will coordinate seminars with local and binational (US-Canada) management agencies to operationalize model results for the Great Lakes basin.

The objectives of this project are to (1) characterize intra- and interspecific variation in bioenergetic and behavioral traits, (2) test for covariation in these traits, which may form integrated ecological strategies corresponding to a pace of life for foraging, (3) study how (co)variation may result in characteristic dynamics in pairwise consumer-resource interactions, and (4) quantify how these dynamics propagate through food webs and across landscapes to affect emergent ecosystem functions such as productivity, yield, and temporal stability. To accomplish these objectives, the fellow will analyze a database of metabolic measurements and highly-resolved telemetry data for individuals of known body size across taxa.

The fellow will use computational experiments to study allometrically-scaled consumer-resource models with newly-introduced parameters for activity, mobility, foraging adaptivity, and metabolic flexibility. Qualitative predictions will be tested using empirical data for food web dynamics and ecosystem function along a gradient of agricultural intensification from pristine communities (high trait variation) to monocultures (low trait variation).

The Centre for Ecosystem Management will provide training in freshwater ecology and connections to management agencies through workshops. Additionally, the fellow will develop open-access curriculum and offer weekly ‘office hours’ to improve literacy in theory and equity in ecological training.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.