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.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Rocking it out at BioBall 2010




Veronik, Marina, Catherine, Connie and I rocking it out at BioBall 2010....

Thursday, April 8, 2010

New MSC student: Grace Lotz

She's been managing our lives (and our lab) for a while now and has been hanging around the lab even longer (I was Grace's departmental advisor for her honors thesis on the feeding ecology of grey whales back in 08/09) - this coming September she joins us as a MSc student. Welcome Grace!

baby salmon need trees!


Next time you are driving the "Sea to Sky" highway up to Whistler take a moment to think of the salmon fry and the foreshore development. Chum salmon fry NEED trees!

Romanuk, T.N. and C.D. Levings. 2010.
"Reciprocal Subsidies and Food Web Pathways Leading to Chum Salmon Fry in a Temperate Marine-Terrestrial Ecotone". PlosOne.

Also check out: Romanuk, T.N. and C.D. Levings. 2006. Relationships between fish and supralittoral vegetation in nearshore marine habitats. Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems 16:115-132.

Romanuk, T.N., and C.D. Levings. 2005. Stable isotope analysis of trophic position and terrestrial vs marine carbon sources for juvenile Pacific salmonids in nearshore marine habitats. Fisheries Management and Ecology 12:113-121.

Romanuk, T.N., and C.D. Levings. 2003. Associations between arthropods and supralittoral vegetation: dependence of terrestrial and aquatic taxa on vegetation. Environmental Entomology 32:1343-1353.