Stable isotopes dissect aquatic food webs from the top to the bottom

By Jack J. Middelburg. 2014

217 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Stable isotopes have been used extensively to study food-web functioning, that is, the flow of energy and matter among organisms. Traditional food-web studies are based on the natural variability of isotopes and are limited to larger organisms that can be physically separated from their environment. Recent developments allow isotope ratio measurements of microbes and this in turn allows the measurement of entire food webs, in other words, from small producers at the bottom to large consumers at the top. Here, I provide a concise review on the use and potential of stable isotopes to reconstruct end-to-end food webs. I will first discuss food web reconstruction based on natural abundances isotope data and will then show that the use of stable isotopes as deliberately added tracers provides complementary information. Finally, challenges and opportunities for end-to-end food web reconstructions in a changing world are discussed.

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0a40423d7588a1e08d04bb81d88ba2a92fec8747

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Citations in the corpus

The Various Roles of Fatty Acids (2018, background): “Stable isotope analysis is a versatile tool that may be applied to study the flow of energy and matter among organisms and estimate their trophic level [303].”
Best practices for use of stable isotope mixing models in food-web studies (2014, background): “…using enriched isotopic tracers to label certain food-web components are other powerful and promising techniques that are being increasingly used to supplement bulk natural abundance isotopic analyses in food-web studies (Van den Meersche et al. 2009; Evrard et al. 2010, 2012; Middelburg 2014).”
Connected macroalgal‐sediment systems: blue carbon and food webs in the deep coastal ocean (2019, background): “Each source’s estimated contribution to macrofaunal diets is not an instantaneous snapshot, but rather a reflection of assimilation over time, so some lag could occur between the maximum uptake of a given food source and a change in a consumer characterization (Middelburg 2014).”
Reviews and syntheses: to the bottom of carbon processing at the seafloor (2017, background): “During the last 2 decades, 13C-labeled phytodetritus addition experiments have been performed to identify the organisms involved in the immediate processing of organic matter delivered to the seafloor (Middelburg, 2014).”