Can the environment change or modify the food web of the animals? Brainliest who gives a detailed and complex answer.
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Hairston's lab studies how individual species, food webs, and whole ecosystems are altered when the environment changes. ... For example, tiny but abundant plankton, eaten by fish and other larger animals, can become adapted to the changed environment within a few years because their generation time is only a few days.
Humans are modifying the world in many ways, and not all of them for the better. The changes we cause are often severe challenges to animals, plants and microbes in nature, from the introduction of pathogens or exotic invasive species to adding toxic substance or excessive nutrients, or causing climatic change. Often several changes occur at once. Nelson Hairston's lab focuses on freshwater environments, especially lakes and ponds, where some of the species present respond to environmental change with decreases in their numbers, even to the point of extinction, while others may benefit to excess, becoming so dominant that they present problems, as in the case of harmful algal blooms stimulated by nutrient enrichment or climate warming. Hairston's lab studies how individual species, food webs, and whole ecosystems are altered when the environment changes.
One way that some freshwater organisms respond to environmental change is to evolve rapidly. A marked change in the environment favors some characteristics of plants, animals and microbes over others. These character differences are often genetically based so that favored characteristics may increase in the next generation. The shorter the generation time, the faster this evolutionary change can occur. For example, tiny but abundant plankton, eaten by fish and other larger animals, can become adapted to the changed environment within a few years because their generation time is only a few days. Hairston's lab has shown that planktonic "water fleas" (Daphnia), major consumers of suspended algae in lakes, evolved to be tolerant of harmful algae within a decade of the appearance of blooms. This rapid evolution (termed "evolutionary rescue" in conservation biology) raises many intriguing questions, for all environments, not just freshwater: To what extent can we rely on species adapting rather than going extinct when their environment changes? How does the evolution of a species that plays a critical ecological role alter the interactions it has with other species, and the functioning of the entire ecosystem?
Ecosystems are being stressed by climate change, but few studies have tested food web responses to changes in precipitation patterns and the consequences to ecosystem function. Fewer still have considered whether results from one geographic region can be applied to other regions, given the degree of community change over large biogeographic gradients.
We assembled, in one field site, three types of macroinvertebrate communities within water‐filled bromeliads. Two represented food webs containing both a fast filter feeder–microbial and slow detritivore energy channels found in Costa Rica and Puerto Rico, and one represented the structurally simpler food webs in French Guiana, which only contained the fast filter feeder–microbial channel. We manipulated the amount and distribution of rain entering bromeliads and examined how food web structure mediated ecosystem responses to changes in the quantity and temporal distribution of precipitation.
Food web structure affected the survival of functional groups in general and ecosystem functions such as decomposition and the production of fine particulate organic matter. Ecosystem processes were more affected by decreased precipitation than were the abundance of micro‐organisms and metazoans. In our experiments, the sensitivity of the ecosystem to precipitation change was primarily revealed in the food web dominated by the single filter feeder–microbial channel because other top‐down and bottom‐up processes were weak or absent.
Our results show stronger effects of food web structure than precipitation change per se on the functioning of bromeliad ecosystems. Consequently, we predict that ecosystem function in bromeliads throughout the Americas will be more sensitive to changes in the distribution of species, rather than to the direct effects caused by changes in precipitation.
Explanation:
Title:- Environment change or modify
food web.
The objective of this research project is to document to the spatial and temporal response to aquatic, marine and terrestrial food webs across climate changes of differing temporal scales.This research project will reconstruct food web dynamics across these intervals.
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