Understanding trophic interactions in a warming world by bridging foraging ecology and biomechanics with network science
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Published version
Author(s)
Cuff, Jordan P
Labonte, David
Windsor, Fredric M
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Climate change will disrupt biological processes at every scale. Ecosystem functions and services vital to ecological resilience are set to shift, with consequences for how we manage land, natural resources, and food systems. Increasing temperatures cause morphological shifts, with concomitant implications for biomechanical performance metrics crucial to trophic interactions. Biomechanical performance, such as maximum bite force or running speed, determines the breadth of resources accessible to consumers, the outcome of interspecific interactions, and thus the structure of ecological networks. Climate change-induced impacts to ecosystem services and resilience are therefore on the horizon, mediated by disruption of biomechanical performance and, consequently, trophic interactions across whole ecosystems. Here, we argue that there is an urgent need to investigate the complex interactions between climate change, biomechanical traits and foraging ecology to help predict changes to ecological networks and ecosystem functioning. We discuss how these seemingly disparate disciplines can be connected through network science. Using an ant-plant network as an example, we illustrate how different data types could be integrated to investigate the interaction between warming, bite force and trophic interactions, and discuss what such an integration will achieve. It is our hope that this integrative framework will help to identify a viable means to elucidate previously intractable impacts of climate change, with effective predictive potential to guide management and mitigation.
Date Issued
2024-08
Date Acceptance
2024-06-08
Citation
Integrative and Comparative Biology, 2024, 64 (2), pp.306-321
ISSN
1540-7063
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Start Page
306
End Page
321
Journal / Book Title
Integrative and Comparative Biology
Volume
64
Issue
2
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
License URL
Identifier
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/38872009
Publication Status
Published
Coverage Spatial
England
Article Number
icae070
Date Publish Online
2024-07-13