When is a change for the better?

Emily Richardson and supervisors Dustin Marshall and Craig White test Earl Werner’s theory that switching phases maximises growth rate, resulting in greater fitness for species with complex development.

Travelling in time: an experimental evolution experiment challenges what we thought we knew about size and the cost of production.

Researchers from the Centre of Geometric Biology leverage Richard Lenski’s 34-year, 60,000-generation Escherichia coli evolution experiment to examine intraspecific metabolic scaling and correlations with demographic parameters.

Long-term experimental evolution decouples size and production costs in Escherichia coli

Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).

A comparative analysis testing Werner’s theory of complex life cycles

Published in Functional Ecology.

Winners and losers: how does metabolic rate affect the outcomes of competition?

Lukas Schuster, Craig White and Dustin Marshall investigate the relationships between metabolic rate and competitive interactions in the field.

Biodiversity increases energy and biomass production but only in younger communities

Using different phytoplankton species, Giulia Ghedini  and colleagues show that biodiversity initially boosts both energy and biomass production, but as biomass grows, energy production is limited by competition.

Metabolic phenotype mediates the outcome of competitive interactions in a response-surface field experiment

Published in Ecology and Evolution.

Challenging assumptions: how well do we understand how climate change will affect vector-borne diseases?

Louise Nørgaard and colleagues challenge the long-held assumption that there is a directly proportional relationship between wing length, body size and reproductive output in mosquitoes.

Predicting the response of disease vectors to global change: The importance of allometric scaling

Published in Global Change Biology.

Phytoplankton diversity affects biomass and energy production differently during community development

Published in Functional Ecology.

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