Summary Viruses and microzooplankton grazers represent major sources of mortality for marine phytoplankton and bacteria, redirecting the flow of organic material throughout the world's oceans. Here, we investigate the use of nonlinear population models of interactions between phytoplankton, viruses and grazers as a means to quantitatively constrain the flow of carbon through marine microbial ecosystems. We augment population m...

The metabolic theory of ecology (MTE) predicts the effects of body size and temperature on metabolism through considerations of vascular distribution networks and biochemical kinetics. MTE has also been extended to characterise processes from cellular to global levels. MTE has generated both enthusiasm and controversy across a broad range of research areas. However, most efforts that claim to validate or invalidate MTE have fo...

Ecology Letters , (2011) Abstract There have been numerous attempts to derive general models for the structure and function of resource delivery networks in biology. Such theories typically predict the quantitative structure of vascular networks across scales. For example, fractal branching models of plant structure predict that the network dimensions within plant stems or leaves should be scale‐free. However, very few empiric...

Theoretical models for allometric relationships between organismal form and function are typically tested by comparing a single predicted relationship with empirical data. Several prominent models, however, predict more than one allometric relationship, and comparisons among alternative models have not taken this into account. Here we evaluate several different scaling models of plant morphology within a hierarchical Bayesian...

We propose a scaled version of the Rosenzweig–MacArthur model using both Type I and Type II functional responses that incorporates the size dependence of interaction rates. Our aim is to link the energetic needs of organisms with the dynamics of interacting populations, for which survival is a result of a game‐theoretic struggle for existence. We solve the scaled model of predator–prey dynamics and predict population level cha...