Effects of warming on predator-prey interactions
This project stems from work carried out during my MSc at Imperial College London, supervised by Eoin O'Gorman and Rebecca Kordas.
As part of a collaborative research project, I spent several months in the field in Iceland collecting data on predator feeding responses to warming. We ran in situ functional response experiments in the Hengill geothermal river system, where we measured the feeding rates of two predators that differed in foraging strategy across a natural gradient of environmental warming. We ran similar experiments in the lab and estimated whether the temperature dependence of functional response parameters differed depending on environmental context (lab or field) or predator foraging strategy. We then used these parameter estimates to calculate the energetic efficiency and predicted population abundance of each predator species with warming.We expanded on some of this work recently by exporing how thermal acclimation can stabilize predator-prey dynamics with warming. We combined data on feeding rates (estimated from lab-based functional response experiments in Iceland) with a population dynamical model, finding that thermal acclimation dampened the thermal sensitivity of predator metabolic rate and feeding rate, leading to increased predator energetic efficiency and ultimately stabilising the population dynamics of both predator and prey.
You can read more about this work in the published papers here and here.