Preface to the Princeton Landmarks in Biology Edition vii Preface xi Symbols Used xiii 1. The Importance of Islands 3 2. Area and Number of Speicies 8 3. Further Explanations of the Area-Diversity Pattern 19 4. The Strategy of Colonization 68 5. Invasibility and the Variable Niche 94 6. Stepping Stones and Biotic Exchange 123 7. Evolutionary Changes Following Colonization 145 8. Prospect 181 Glossary 185 References 193 Index 201

The Theory of Island Biogeography

Phylogenetic identification and in situ detection of individual microbial cells without cultivation.

Recently developed techniques for estimating bacterial biomass and productivity indicate that bacterial biomass in the sea is related to phytoplankton concentration and that bacteria utilise 10 to 50 % of carbon fixed by photosynthesis. Evidence is presented to suggest that numbers of free bacteria are controlled by nanoplankton~c heterotrophic flagellates which are ubiquitous in the marine water column. The flagellates in turn are preyed upon by microzooplankton. Heterotrophic flagellates and microzooplankton cover the same size range as the phytoplankton, thus providing the means for returning some energy from the 'microbial loop' to the conventional planktonic food chain.

/pdf/the-ecological-role-of-water-column-microbes-in-the-sea-34dv8tiwzr.pdf

The Ecological Role of Water-Column Microbes in the Sea*

Body size is manifestly one of the most important attributes of an organism from an ecological and evolutionary point of view. Size has a predominant influence on an animal's energetic requirements, its potential for resource exploitation, and its susceptibility to natural enemies. A large literature now exists on how physiological, life history, and population parameters scale with body dimensions (24, 131). The ecological literature on species interactions and the structure of animal communities also stresses the importance of body size. Differences in body size are a major means by which species avoid direct overlap in resource use (153), and size-selective predation can be a primary organizing force in some communities (20, 70). Size thus imposes important constraints on the manner in which an organism interacts with its environment and influences the strength, type, and symmetry of interactions with other species (152, 207). Paradoxically, ecologists have virtually ignored the implications of these observations for interactions among species that exhibit size-distributed populations. For instance, it has been often suggested that competing species

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2096954.pdf

The ontogenetic niche and species interactions in size-structured populations

I. CONTEXT * The Ecosystem Concept * Earth's Climate System * Geology and Soils * II. MECHANISMS * Terrestrial Water and Energy Balance * Carbon Input to Terrestrial Ecosystems * Terrestrial Production Processes * Terrestrial Decomposition * Terrestrial Plant Nutrient Use * Terrestrial Nutrient Cycling * Aquatic Carbon and Nutrient Cycling * Trophic Dynamics * Community Effects on Ecosystem Processes * III. PATTERNS * Temporal Dynamics * Landscape Heterogeneity and Ecosystem Dynamics * IV. INTEGRATION * Global Biogeochemical Cycles * Managing and Sustaining Ecosystem * Abbreviations * Glossary * References

Principles of Terrestrial Ecosystem Ecology

Virtually all nonequilibrium electron transfers on Earth are driven by a set of nanobiological machines composed largely of multimeric protein complexes associated with a small number of prosthetic groups. These machines evolved exclusively in microbes early in our planet's history yet, despite their antiquity, are highly conserved. Hence, although there is enormous genetic diversity in nature, there remains a relatively stable set of core genes coding for the major redox reactions essential for life and biogeochemical cycles. These genes created and coevolved with biogeochemical cycles and were passed from microbe to microbe primarily by horizontal gene transfer. A major challenge in the coming decades is to understand how these machines evolved, how they work, and the processes that control their activity on both molecular and planetary scales.

/pdf/the-microbial-engines-that-drive-earth-s-biogeochemical-269mdmipek.pdf

The Microbial Engines That Drive Earth's Biogeochemical Cycles

Small organisms (less than 1 millimeter in length) tend to have a cosmopolitan distribution. This is a consequence of huge absolute population sizes rather than any inherent properties of particular taxonomic groups. At the local scale, the diversity of small species exceeds that of larger organisms, but at the global scale this relation is reversed, because endemism is largely responsible for the species richness of large organisms. For small organisms, the relationship between species and area is flat, and a latitudinal diversity gradient is absent or weak. These patterns are explained by some of the assumptions underlying the unified neutral community model.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1641/0006-3568(2004)054[0777:TUOSSP]2.0.CO;2

The Ubiquity of Small Species: Patterns of Local and Global Diversity

The paper describes the ecosystem constituted by marine sediments and their microfiora and fauna but with special emphasis on the ecology of ciliated protozoa. This description is based on quantitative studies of the vertical and horizontal distribution of the fauna, the physicochemical factors (O2, H2, S, Eh, pH, grain size, organic matter, salinity) and the microfiora, and on model experiments with artificial and natural sediments. Factors controlling the oxidation-reduction properties of sediments, the O2-uptake of reduced sediments and the respiration and photosynthesis of undisturbed sediments were studied. Among other things it is demonstrated that the microfaunal communities can be correlated with the oxidation-reduction properties of sediments and with their mechanical composition and that the endproducts of anaerobic decomposition (notably H2S) are of large trophic significance to the sediment ecosystem through the activity of cherno- and photoautotrophic bacteria. The energetic role of ...

The ecology of marine microbenthos IV. Structure and function of the benthic ecosystem, its chemical and physical factors and the microfauna commuities with special reference to the ciliated protozoa

The wide variety of unicellular, phagotrophic eucaryotes known collectively as heterotrophic microflagellates has recently attracted much attention particularly among biological oceanographers. Knowledge of the morphology, systematic affinities, and general biology of members of this heterogeneous assemblage of protists is still far from complete. Even so, literature spanning over more than a century gives evidence of the diversity of these forms and of their ubiquitous occurrence. Lohmann (1911, 1920) attempted to quantify these small protozoans in seawater and assess their ecological significance, and Griessmann (1914) isolated a variety of forms in culture and described aspects of their biology.

Tom Fenchel

Papers

The Ecological Role of Water-Column Microbes in the Sea*

The Microbial Engines That Drive Earth's Biogeochemical Cycles

The Ubiquity of Small Species: Patterns of Local and Global Diversity

The ecology of marine microbenthos IV. Structure and function of the benthic ecosystem, its chemical and physical factors and the microfauna commuities with special reference to the ciliated protozoa

The ecology of heterotrophic microflagellates