Surprise with the creature in the warm lid

(When we imagine a predator and prey, most of us think of images of lions lurking and the antelopes are anxious, or A falcon with sharp claws is grabbing an unlucky squirrel.

But a postdoctoral researcher, Ben Baiser, the lead author of a study at Oikos, conducted a study of marshy carnivorous plants, showing a complex world you can see inside small warm plants.

The activity of the pitcher plant seems simple: The tubular leaves of the tree collect and hold rainwater, which will drown the ants, beetles, and the flies that 'stumble' into this trap.

However, rainwater inside the warm part of the plant is not only a dangerous pond but also contains a complex system of aquatic life, including mosquitoes that are starving, flies that eat meat and larvae, and mosquito bugs, rotifers, copepods (a small legged crustacean with 6 legs in the chest, many in floating organisms or parasites on fish), roundworms and multicellular algae. These tiny creatures play an important role in helping the cap plant to digest food. They create what scientists call 'processing chains' : when a bug drowns in warm water, mosquito larvae swim to and cut it into smaller pieces, bacteria eat the pieces. small, rotifers eat these bacteria and the pitcher plant absorbs the waste of the rotifers.

But that's not the whole story. Fly larvae also feed on rotifers, mosquito larvae, and these tiny organisms, and all other small organisms eat bacteria. It is a very complicated food net.

Aaron Ellison, a co-author of the research and senior ecologist at Harvard Forestry School, said the lid's food web is an ideal model for researchers to better understand food webs. larger, with top-level predators like wolves - changes over a longer period.

He pointed out: "With warm pitched plants, you can grasp the entire food net in your hand. The large number of pitched plants in a swamp provides endless opportunities for detailed experiments on food net activity, not only in warm plants, but also in larger ecosystems such as ponds, lakes or oceans that are harder to study ".

With funding from the National Science Foundation, the team went to the swamp in British Columbia, Quebec City, and Georgia - the entire range of this plant species - to analyze aquatic food webs from 60 plants. warm lid. They found 35 different types of organisms inside the kettles, with a large number of bacteria counted as one type. After that, Baiser said: 'We wanted to know why we have different food nets in separate kettles from the same living ponds. What created different food nets?

Some well-established scientific models predict, the way food nets form based on a ranking system of ecological factors. With research Oikos, Baiser and his colleagues examined actual observations that contradict those models. He explained: 'Suppose you have a group of lakes. And you have a big bucket that holds all the species that can live in those lakes. When you dump the bucket, which animal ends in the lake? What are the more problems: the size of the lake, or the fact that the X-eating species is there? Or is it random? These models help us tear those elements into pieces. "

According to the Oikos study, the way the food mesh in the assembled lid tree is not random. In fact, it seems that interactions between predators and prey are of key importance.'You take out a species, that will affect everything , ' Baiser said.