A growing body of literature suggests that the effects of host diet on populations of parasites within a host (i.e., infrapopulations) are dictated by the elemental stoichiometry of the parasite, and new data suggest that the stoichiometric composition of parasites can shift in response to a host's diet. The consequences of this shift in parasite stoichiometry for host–parasite interactions are underexplored. Here, we present...

Summary We measured the stoichiometric trait distribution of cultured freshwater bacterial populations under different resource conditions and compared them to natural microbial communities sampled from three lakes. Trait distributions showed population differences among growth phases and community differences among lakes that would have been masked by only reporting the mean biomass value. The stoichiometric trait distributio...