Henrique C. Giacomini

Patterns of interactions of a large fish-parasite network in a tropical floodplain.

1. Describing and explaining the structure of species interaction networks is of paramount importance for community ecology. Yet much has to be learned about the mechanisms responsible for major patterns, such as nestedness and modularity in different kinds of systems, of which large and diverse networks are a still underrepresented and scarcely studied fraction. 2. We assembled information on fishes and their parasites living in a large floodplain of key ecological importance for freshwater ecosystems in the Paraná River basin in South America. The resulting fish-parasite network containing 72 and 324 species of fishes and parasites, respectively, was analysed to investigate the patterns of nestedness and modularity as related to fish and parasite features. 3. Nestedness was found in the entire network and among endoparasites, multiple-host life cycle parasites and native hosts, but not in networks of ectoparasites, single-host life cycle parasites and non-native fishes. All networks were significantly modular. Taxonomy was the major hosts attribute influencing both nestedness and modularity: more closely related host species tended to be associated with more nested parasite compositions and had greater chance of belonging to the same network module. Nevertheless, host abundance had a positive relationship with nestedness when only native host species pairs of the same network module were considered for analysis. 4. These results highlight the importance of evolutionary history of hosts in linking patterns of nestedness and formation of modules in the network. They also show that functional attributes of parasites (i.e. parasitism mode and life cycle) and origin of host populations (i.e. natives versus non-natives) are crucial to define the relative contribution of these two network properties and their dependence on other ecological factors (e.g. host abundance), with potential implications for community dynamics and stability.

Predator bioenergetics and the prey size spectrum: Do foraging costs determine fish production?

Most models of fish growth and predation dynamics assume that food ingestion rate is the major component of the energy budget affected by prey availability, while active metabolism is invariant (here called constant activity hypothesis). However, increasing empirical evidence supports an opposing view: fish tend to adjust their foraging activity to maintain reasonably constant ingestion levels in the face of varying prey density and/or quality (the constant satiation hypothesis). In this paper, we use a simple but flexible model of fish bioenergetics to show that constant satiation is likely to occur in fish that optimize both net production rate and life history. The model includes swimming speed as an explicit measure of foraging activity leading to both energy gains (through prey ingestion) and losses (through active metabolism). The fish is assumed to be a particulate feeder that has to swim between consecutive individual prey captures, and that shifts its diet ontogenetically from smaller to larger prey. The prey community is represented by a negative power-law size spectrum. From these rules, we derive the net production of fish as a function of the size spectrum, and this in turn establishes a formal link between the optimal life history (i.e. maximum body size) and prey community structure. In most cases with realistic parameter values, optimization of life history ensures that: (i) a constantly satiated fish preying on a steep size spectrum will stop growing and invest all its surplus energy in reproduction before satiation becomes too costly; (ii) conversely, a fish preying on a shallow size spectrum will grow large enough for satiation to be present throughout most of its ontogeny. These results provide a mechanistic basis for previous empirical findings, and call for the inclusion of active metabolism as a major factor limiting growth potential and the numerical response of predators in theoretical studies of food webs.

Adaptive responses of energy storage and fish life histories to climatic gradients.

Energy storage is a common adaptation of fish living in seasonal environments. For some species, the energy accumulated during the growing season, and stored primarily as lipids, is crucial to preventing starvation mortality over winter. Thus, in order to understand the adaptive responses of fish life history to climate, it is important to determine how energy should be allocated to storage and how it trades off with the other body components that contribute to fitness. In this paper, we extend previous life history theory to include an explicit representation of how the seasonal allocation of energy to storage acts as a constraint on fish growth. We show that a strategy that privileges allocation to structural mass in the first part of the growing season and switches to storage allocation later on, as observed empirically in several fish species, is the strategy that maximizes growth efficiency and hence is expected to be favored by natural selection. Stochastic simulations within this theoretical framework demonstrate that the relative performance of this switching strategy is robust to a wide range of fluctuations in growing season length, and to moderate short-term (i.e., daily) fluctuations in energy intake and/or expenditure within the growing season. We then integrate this switching strategy with a biphasic growth modeling framework to predict typical growth rates of walleye Sander vitreus, a cool water species, and lake trout Salvelinus namaycush, a cold water specialist, across a climatic gradient in North America. As predicted, growth rates increased linearly with the duration of the growing season. Regression line intercepts were negative, indicating that growth can only occur when growing season length exceeds a threshold necessary to produce storage for winter survival. The model also reveals important differences between species, showing that observed growth rates of lake trout are systematically higher than those of walleye in relatively colder lakes. This systematic difference is consistent with both (i) the expected superior capacity of lake trout to withstand harsh winter conditions, and (ii) some degree of counter gradient adaptation of lake trout growth capacity to the climatic gradient covered by our data.

Influence of host diet and phylogeny on parasite sharing by fish in a diverse tropical floodplain.

The patterns of parasite sharing among hosts have important implications for ecosystem structure and functioning, and are influenced by several ecological and evolutionary factors associated with both hosts and parasites. Here we evaluated the influence of fish diet and phylogenetic relatedness on the pattern of infection by parasites with contrasting life history strategies in a freshwater ecosystem of key ecological importance in South America. The studied network of interactions included 52 fish species, which consumed 58 food types and were infected with 303 parasite taxa. Our results show that both diet and evolutionary history of hosts significantly explained parasite sharing; phylogenetically close fish species and/or species sharing food types tend to share more parasites. However, the effect of diet was observed only for endoparasites in contrast to ectoparasites. These results are consistent with the different life history strategies and selective pressures imposed on these groups: endoparasites are in general acquired via ingestion by their intermediate hosts, whereas ectoparasites actively seek and attach to the gills, body surface or nostrils of its sole host, thus not depending directly on its feeding habits.

Does consumption rate scale superlinearly

Arising from S. Pawar, A. I. Dell & V. M. Savage 486, 485–489 10.1038/nature11131(2012)A recent paper by Pawar and colleagues has provided important insights into the consequences of foraging behaviour for food-web dynamics. One notable pattern predicted by their analysis is that consumption rate (c) scales superlinearly (cm1.16) with consumer body mass (m) in three-dimensional (3D), but not two-dimensional (2D), foraging spaces. Although we feel that the authors should be applauded for this interesting contribution, we argue that their result is not consistent with established life-history theory. To resolve this contradiction, progress in both fields is probably required, including new empirical studies in which consumption rate, metabolism and dimensionality are examined directly under natural conditions.

Ecological modelling, size distributions and taphonomic size bias in dinosaur faunas: a comment on Codron et al. (2012).

Codron et al. [[1][1]] invoke an ecological model of size-specific competition in dinosaurs to explain an apparent bimodal distribution within Dinosauria, and find ‘intermediate-sized taxa’ (1–1000 kg) are prone to extinction. Although the authors take an interesting approach, we argue that