Marine heatwaves are projected to occur more frequently in near future and can favor the occurrence of cyanobacteria blooms. Cyanobacteria typically provide low dietary quality for consumers due to their lack of long‐chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (LC‐PUFA). This can alter the fatty acid composition of their primary consumers and trigger cascading effects throughout the food chain. In this study, we investigated the combine...

Soil organic carbon (SOC) can persist from days to millennia but remains vulnerable to carbon (C) loss upon disturbances, depending on environmental conditions and mode of stabilization. Understanding drivers of persistence and vulnerability is crucial to assess soil C sequestration as well as potential SOC losses due to changes in climate and land use. Here, we investigate SOC persistence and vulnerability in five land‐use ty...

In natural water bodies, the light spectrum changes with depth, often toward a higher proportion of blue light. While spectral niche partitioning and functional redundancy are important concepts, our understanding of how light spectrum changes affect phytoplankton communities is limited. To understand how phytoplankton respond to changes in spectral light availability, we studied the effects of light quality on species growth,...

Animals face strong environmental variability even on short time scales particularly in shallow coastal habitats, forcing them to permanently adjust their metabolism. Respiration rates of aquatic ectotherms are directly influenced by water temperature, whereas ingestion rates might additionally be influenced by behavior. We aim to understand how respiration and ingestion rates of an aquatic invertebrate respond to changing tem...

Phytoplankton responses to nutrient enrichment are often assumed to be universal, but in practice they can significantly vary because the effect size to an increased supply of one nutrient may depend on the availability of the other. Here, we used two complementary two‐way factorial experiments to determine how responses of lake phytoplankton to increased N and P supply vary with increasing concentrations of the other nutrient...

Shallow aquatic environments are characterized by strong environmental variability. For ectotherms, temperature is the main driver of metabolic activity, thus also shaping performance. Ingestion rates in mysids are fast responses, influenced by metabolic and behavioral activity. We examined ingestion rates of the mysid Neomysis integer , collected in the Baltic Sea, after one-week exposure to different constant and fluctuating...

Treponema paraluisleporidarum infects both rabbits (ecovar Cuniculus) and hares (ecovar Lepus). While the occurrence of the bacterium has previously been reported for European brown hares ( Lepus europaeus ) and domestic rabbits ( Oryctolagus cuniculus f. domestica ), there are no data available that report infection in the European context. We tested a total of 1,995 serum samples and 287 genital swabs from opportunistically...

Relatively little is known about how plant–soil feedbacks (PSFs) may affect plant growth in field conditions where factors such as herbivory may be important. Using a potted experiment in a grassland, we measured PSFs with and without aboveground insect herbivory for 20 plant species. We then compared PSF values to plant landscape abundance. Aboveground herbivory had a large negative effect on PSF values. For 15 of 20 species,...

Theory predicts that resource variability hinders consumer performance. How this effect depends on the temporal structure of resource fluctuations encountered by individuals remains poorly understood. Combining modelling and growth experiments with Daphnia magna , we decompose the complexity of resource fluctuations and test the effect of resource variance, supply peak timing (i.e. phase) and co‐limiting resource covariance al...

Understanding animal performance in heterogeneous or variable environments is a central question in ecology. We combine modelling and experiments to test how temperature and food availability variance jointly affect life‐history traits of ectotherms. The model predicts that as mean temperatures move away from the ectotherm's thermal optimum, the effect size of joint thermal and food variance should become increasingly sensitiv...

Organism growth can be limited either by a single resource or by multiple resources simultaneously (co‐limitation). Efforts to characterise co‐limitation have generated two influential approaches. One approach uses limitation scenarios of factorial growth assays to distinguish specific types of co‐limitation; the other uses growth responses spanned over a continuous, multi‐dimensional resource space to characterise different t...

The underlying mechanisms and consequences of competition and diversity are central themes in ecology. A higher diversity of primary producers often results in higher resource use efficiency in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. This may result in more food for consumers on one hand, while, on the other hand, it can also result in a decreased food quality for consumers; higher biomass combined with the same availability of th...

In food webs, herbivores are often constrained by low food quality in terms of mineral and biochemical limitations, which in aquatic ecosystems can co‐occur with limited oxygen conditions. As low food quality implies that carbon (C) is available in excess, and therefore a regulation to get rid of excess C is crucial for the performance of consumers, we examined the C pathways (ingestion, feces release, excretion, and respirati...

The nutrition of animal consumers is an important regulator of ecological processes due to its effects on their physiology, life‐history and behaviour. Understanding the ecological effects of poor nutrition depends on correctly diagnosing the nature and strength of nutritional limitation. Despite the need to assess nutritional limitation, current approaches to delineating nutritional constraints can be non‐specific and impreci...

Ecology Letters (2011) Abstract There is growing consensus that the growth of herbivorous consumers is frequently limited by more than one nutrient simultaneously. This understanding, however, is based primarily on theoretical considerations and the applicability of existing concepts of co‐limitation has rarely been tested experimentally. Here, we assessed the suitability of two contrasting concepts of resource limitation, i.e...

We present data on eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA)‐limited growth responses of Daphnia magna under different temperatures and different dietary cholesterol availabilities to assess how EPA growth saturation thresholds depend on changing environmental conditions. D. magna was raised on gradients of dietary EPA at 15°C and 20°C with high cholesterol supply and at 20°C with low and high cholesterol supply in laboratory experiments. A...

To assess the significance of nutrient interactions on animal performance, life‐history experiments were conducted with the freshwater herbivore Daphnia magna in a system with two limiting nutrients (i.e., sterols and polyunsaturated fatty acids [PUFAs]). By experimentally increasing the availability of dietary cholesterol either in the absence or in the presence of different dietary PUFAs we investigated whether dietary PUFAs...