Animals can be important in modulating ecosystem‐level nutrient cycling, although their importance varies greatly among species and ecosystems. Nutrient cycling rates of individual animals represent valuable data for testing the predictions of important frameworks such as the Metabolic Theory of Ecology ( MTE ) and ecological stoichiometry ( ES ). They also represent an important set of functional traits that may reflect both...

A variety of interacting physical, chemical, and biological hypotheses have been proposed to explain the formation of deep chlorophyll layers (DCL). We used an experiment to test the importance of zooplankton grazing and nutrient transport as factors maintaining the DCL. In oligotrophic Yellow Belly Lake (Sawtooth Mountains, central Idaho), which has a DCL, we compared changes in the chlorophyll profiles in 17‐m‐deep limnocorr...