A Mechanistic Approach to Plankton Ecology

Abstract

Our limited intuition of the small-scale world of the plankton has biased the way we describe and understand ocean ecology. Classical approaches consider fluxes of energy and matter between species and populations to describe marine ecosystems but biological interactions occur between individuals rather than between the abstract entities of ‘populations’ or “trophic levels.” A complementary approach is to derive system properties from mechanistic insights in individual functioning and interactions. Plankton live in a world that is radically different from ours, and to which we have limited access. Visualization is central to developing an intuition for this world, which together with insights in small-scale fluid physics may allow a mechanistic understanding of individual interactions and deduction of properties of populations and ecosystems. This lecture demonstrates the mechanistic approach through a number of examples, including numerous videos.