Food Web Ecology Lab: Summer field work

Aquatic Food Web Ecology Lab, Dalhousie University

Research in the Aquatic Food Web Ecology Lab based at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, focuses on the consequences of biodiversity loss to the functioning and stability of aquatic food webs. All of our work is done in a food web context, which means that its not just the numbers of species that we are interested in, but also the structure of the food webs in which those species are embedded. Most of our work is done in aquatic microcosms, small container ecosystems in which we can assemble food webs and then subject them to various types of disturbance regimes . We also use mathematical models to run "in silico" experiments, otherwise known as computer simulations, to study problems that are too complex or just not possible to conduct in natural systems.

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Summer field work

This is a really exciting summer for us at the foodweb lab.
We headed down to Jamaica last month (in April) to collect some tropical rock pool beasties

,
and now we are focusing our attention on the meiofaunal communities in Arctic rock pools (up in Churchill, MA)

and local supralittoral rock pool communities in Nova Scotia

. We have got some great cultures going from Jamaica and this month we will also be starting some experiments with Brian Starzomski, Marta Coll, and Heike Lotze testing some "fishing down the food web" predictions.