Bachelor project in trophic ecology – Mehdi Cherif.
A model of functional response in blue mussels:
from individuals to populations.
Differences among individuals matter! This is fact in evolutionary biology and one pillar
of the law of natural selection. But ecologists tend to group organisms into species or
populations by averaging their properties and ecological effects. However, recently
accumulating evidence emphasizes the importance of individual variations on ecological
interactions and ecosystem functioning.
Functional response in ecology is the rate of ingestion of a resource by a consumer as a
function of the resource density. Slight changes in the shape of this response are critical in
determining the dynamics of predator-prey interactions and food webs. For this reason, it has
been the focus of much research since many decades. But only a handful of studies consider
the effects of individual variability.
You will contribute to this effort, building on a previous project work, by deriving from
the different individual functional responses a model for a functional response at the
population level. You will then explore how predictions about predator-prey dynamics of blue
mussels feeding on the plankton are different from classical models that assume the same
functional response for all individuals. To this end, you will rely on user-friendly but rigorous
simulation software developed at the University of Berkeley.
If interested, please contact:
Dr. Mehdi Cherif
Room A4-42-21
Ecology and Environmental Science Department
Umeå University
Phone: 090-786 9239
mehdi.cherif@umu.se