What is it about?
Organisms must allocate energy and resources to all basic life functions, and this leads to inescapable trade-offs. These trade-offs govern the species composition and functioning of ecosystems. We show that perhaps the most commonly-assumed trade-off in ecology – between relative performance at low and high resource (food) levels – does not exist. Instead, species that do better at low resource levels also do better at high resource levels. Models predicting how communities respond to environmental change will need to be re-evaluated in light of this. Our results also imply that the most important trade-off in nature is probably that between the ability to grow fast and survive the threat of predation.
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This page is a summary of: Heterotrophic eukaryotes show a slow-fast continuum, not a gleaner–exploiter trade-off, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, September 2020, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2008370117.
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