trophic level

Body size drives global species packing of reef fishes across spatial scales

Our findings suggest that body size distribution, reef area, and temperature are major predictors of species richness and accumulation across scales, consistent with recent theories linking home range to species-area relationships as well as metabolic effects on speciation rates. Based on our results, we hypothesise that in less diverse areas, species are larger and likely more dispersive, leading to larger range sizes and less turnover between sites...

The energetics of fish growth and how it constrains food-web trophic structure

The allocation of metabolic energy to growth fundamentally influences all levels of biological organisation. Here we use a first‐principles theoretical model to characterise the energetics of fish growth at distinct ontogenetic stages and in distinct thermal regimes...

Scaling

Linking biological levels of organisation through energetics.

Energetic and ecological constraints on population density of reef fishes

Population ecology has classically focused on pairwise species interactions, hindering the description of general patterns and processes of population abundance at large spatial scales. Here we use the metabolic theory of ecology as a framework to formulate and test a model that yields predictions linking population density to the physiological constraints of body size and temperature on individual metabolism, and the ecological constraints of trophic structure and species richness on energy partitioning among species...

Scaling metabolism from individuals to reef-fish communities at broad spatial scales

Fishes contribute substantially to energy and nutrient fluxes in reef ecosystems, but quantifying these roles is challenging. Here, we do so by synthesising a large compilation of fish metabolic-rate data with a comprehensive database on reef-fish community abundance and biomass...