Aquatic Ecology Laboratory, Graduate School of Life Sciences, Tohoku University, 6-3 Aza-Aoba, Aramaki, Aoba-ku, Sendai, Miyagi, 980-8578, Japan.
Lake Biwa Branch Office, Center for Regional Environmental Research, National Institute for Environmental Studies, 5-34 Yanagasaki, Otsu, Shiga, 520-0022, Japan.
Commun Biol. 2021 Jan 8;4(1):49. doi: 10.1038/s42003-020-01587-9.
The biomass ratio of herbivores to primary producers reflects the structure of a community. Four primary factors have been proposed to affect this ratio, including production rate, defense traits and nutrient contents of producers, and predation by carnivores. However, identifying the joint effects of these factors across natural communities has been elusive, in part because of the lack of a framework for examining their effects simultaneously. Here, we develop a framework based on Lotka-Volterra equations for examining the effects of these factors on the biomass ratio. We then utilize it to test if these factors simultaneously affect the biomass ratio of freshwater plankton communities. We found that all four factors contributed significantly to the biomass ratio, with carnivore abundance having the greatest effect, followed by producer stoichiometric nutrient content. Thus, the present framework should be useful for examining the multiple factors shaping various types of communities, both aquatic and terrestrial.
草食动物与初级生产者的生物量比反映了群落的结构。有四个主要因素被提出影响这个比例，包括生产者的生产力、防御特征和营养含量，以及肉食动物的捕食。然而，确定这些因素在自然群落中的共同影响一直难以捉摸，部分原因是缺乏同时检验这些因素影响的框架。在这里，我们开发了一个基于Lotka-Volterra 方程的框架来检验这些因素对生物量比的影响。然后，我们利用它来测试这些因素是否同时影响淡水浮游生物群落的生物量比。我们发现，所有四个因素都对生物量比有显著贡献，其中肉食动物的丰度影响最大，其次是生产者的化学计量营养含量。因此，这个框架应该有助于检验多种因素对水生和陆地各种类型群落的塑造作用。
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