[LTER-mcm-pi] 5 min gem for the week

[John Barrett]

Wow, that's uncanny John. I was just using the paradox of the plankton in
discussion with my grad students.

My guess would be viruses to explain diversity in lakes. They are otherwise
too stable - unless we can invoke flood years as a physical disruption that
offsets competative exclusion. Are there data in the cool years to show
decreases in diversity? That would be a test of whether floods acted to
upset equilibrium in species composition.



On Wed, Sep 16, 2015 at 12:15 PM, Priscu, John <jpriscu at montana.edu> wrote:

> Sorry that I missed the call yesterday—didn’t get home from Europe until
> midnight and was not well organized—in other words, I forgot about the call.
>
>
>
> Here would be my gem for the week: So, where does the MCM fit into
> Terborgh’s scheme? We have few predators (I think we do—at least for the
> lakes), yet biodiversity is relatively high. What replaces predators in our
> system—Viruses? physical disruption? Maybe physical disruption occurs
> faster than competitive exclusion, maintaining high diversity? This kind of
> contemporaneous disequilibrium has been proposed by Richerson et al. 1970
> (attached) [Richerson was the chair of my grad committee].
>
>
>
> JP
>
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>
>


-- 
J. E. Barrett, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
2125 Derring Hall
Department of Biological Sciences
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg VA, 24061
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