Body size is a decisive functional trait in many organisms, especially for phytoplankton,
which span several orders of magnitude in cell volume. Therefore, the analysis of size as a …

Charles Elton introduced the “pyramid of numbers” in the late 1920s, but this remarkable
insight into body-size dependent patterns in natural communities lay fallow until the theory of …

This concise, readable introduction to limnology (the science of investigating the structure
and function of inland waters), places the subject in the context of modern ecology. Unlike …

Organism size is one of the key determinants of community structure, and its relationship
with abundance can describe how biomass is partitioned among the biota within an …

Oithona has been described as the most ubiquitous and abundant copepod in the world's
oceans. Most of our knowledge of zooplankton abundance and distribution is derived from …

Life is constructed from a limited toolkit: the Periodic Table. The reduction of oxygen
provides the largest free energy release per electron transfer, except for the reduction of …

It has long been hypothesized that aquatic biomass is evenly distributed among logarithmic
body mass size classes. Although this community structure has been observed regionally …

Under climate change, model ensembles suggest that declines in phytoplankton biomass
amplify into greater reductions at higher trophic levels, with serious implications for fisheries …

This paper first reviews the concept of functional diversity in general terms and then applies
it to free-living aquatic ciliates. Ciliates are extremely versatile organisms and display an …

The size spectrum of an ecological community characterizes how a property, such as
abundance or biomass, varies with body size. Size spectra are often used as ecosystem …