The Marine Microbial Food Web E-Book

Tron Frede Thingstad

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 481

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

An authoritative and up-to-date exploration of how the competition-defence trade-off has shaped the marine microbial food web

In The Marine Microbial Food Web: Competition and Defence as Shaping Forces from Ecosystem to Genes, distinguished researcher Tron Frede Thingstad delivers an insightful and practical discussion of the microbial portion of the ocean’s food web. The author describes how specific factors, including evolution, biodiversity, organism life strategies, genome organization, biogeochemistry, food web structure, and population dynamics, can be understood as the consequences of the balance between competition and defence.

Using modular idealized mathematical models developed from classical Lotka-Volterra formulations, the book describes models that explain the balance between production and consumption of organic material in the photic zone and the potential for export to the ocean’s interior. It also explains how the models are relevant to contemporary climate change and a variety of other modern applications.

Readers will also find:

• A thorough explanation of why the pathogenicity of many “L-strategists” probably originated as coincidental evolution from originally evolved mechanisms for predator defence
• Comprehensive explorations of the role of the marine microbial food web in ocean biogeochemistry and production
• Practical discussions of simple mathematical models of competition, defence, trade-off, and fitness
• Fulsome treatments of a wide range of organization levels, including individual cells and larger communities of organisms

Perfect for researchers, students, and instructors of marine ecology, marine microbiology, and microbial oceanography, The Marine Microbial Food Web will also prove invaluable to limnologists, oceanographers, and students with an interest in applied mathematics.

Leseprobe

The Marine Microbial Food Web

Competition and Defence as Shaping Forces from Ecosystem to Genes

Tron Frede Thingstad

Department of Biological Sciences, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

This edition first published 2025© 2025 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data Applied for:Hardback ISBN: 9781394251629Adobe ePDF ISBN: 9781394251643ePub ISBN: 9781394251636oBook ISBN: 9781394251650

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About the Author

Tron Frede Thingstad received a degree in biophysics from the University of Oslo in 1973 with a thesis analysing stability properties in bacterial chemostat cultures. This was a time when computers had recently become strong enough to run ecosystem models. This evoked an optimistic spirit in ecologists, hoping that this could be the tool needed to generate the holistic ecosystem descriptions then advocated in ecology. An opportunity for pursuing such ideas suddenly arose in marine microbial ecology when there was an uncontrolled blow‐out from one of the new oil fields in the North Sea, raising the politically urgent question of whether the natural bacterial community in sea water would degrade the pollution. With colleagues at the University of Bergen, Norway, sharing common interests and complementary expertise on microbial ecology, this path led into laboratory work with artificial microbial food webs, field work in Norwegian fjords, the Arctic and, in the context of European research programs, the Mediterranean Sea. In this book, Thingstad summarizes his view of what a modern ‘holistic description of the marine microbial food web’ could be.

Preface

Natural selection is a process that works at the level of individuals. These individuals have two possibilities to affect their fitness: to increase either their competitive or their defensive skills. As a result, competition and defence have worked together through more than four billion years of evolution as the main forces shaping the genes, organisms and food webs of today's ecosystems. Differences in physical and chemical conditions create differences in the constraints to these individual‐level selection processes in different biotopes, reflected in the differences at the ecosystem level.

With this as a unifying perspective to diversity and complexity, this book is an attempt to summarize the present understanding, not only of what the contemporary Marine Microbial Food Web (MMFW) looks like but also how and why it became like this, and what consequences it has, from genome organization to basin scale biogeochemistry.

While this may sound as an abstract journey into the basic foundations of ecosystem organization, it comes with an urgent background of life's reality: the need to understand the properties of a biotope that covers 2/3 of the earth's surface and therefore constitutes a significant part of the complex socio‐economic‐ecological life support system in which we all live and on which our future depends.

Microbial ecology has the experimental advantage that whole ecosystems can be studied and manipulated at time and size scales feasible in a laboratory. Due to methodological developments, in particular the ability to sequence DNA, our ability to observe the MMFW at the resolution levels of species and strains, genomes and genes, has also changed dramatically over a few decades. With these tools, the MMFW, with its relatively simple organisms living in a relatively homogenous environment, may be one of the few(?) natural systems where a genes‐to‐ecosystem description may be a realistic goal within a reasonably near future.

Completion and future revisions of the genes‐to‐ecosystem story outlined here will depend on the co‐operation of students from disciplines that differ in their scientific traditions, literature and terminologies; differences that easily hamper inter‐disciplinary co‐operation. The ambition has therefore been a text that is accessible to students of the MMFW starting with different backgrounds. An inevitable consequence is that parts of the text may appear trivial, while other may appear more difficult, depending on the reader's background education. Maybe this is inevitable when the ambition is a text that can serve to give students with different expertise a shared common platform of knowledge, hopefully facilitating the communication and co‐operation needed for developing new ideas on the MMFW.

To keep the focus on ecology, experimental methods are not described in detail, neither are the technical aspects of computer programming. For those interested in pursuing the modelling aspects, Matlab® codes discussed in the text are available (see Appendix).

This book relies heavily on discussions and ideas developed through joint experimental and theory developments in the Research Group for Marine Microbiology at the University of Bergen, Norway. Without the collaborative spirit and the complementary expertise of members of this group and its collaborators, this book could not have been written.

Tron Frede Thingstad

Bergen, Norway, October 2024

About the Companion Website

This book is accompanied by a companion website.

www.wiley.com/go/Thingstad/marine_microbial_foodweb1e 

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