Check out this new preprint from a collaboration between Jordan, David Labonte (Imperial College) and Fred Windsor (Cardiff University):
Climate change will disrupt biological processes at every scale. Ecosystem functions and services vital to ecological resilience are set to shift, with consequences for how we manage land, natural resources, and food systems. Increasing temperatures cause morphological shifts, with concomitant implications for biomechanical performance metrics crucial to trophic interactions. Biomechanical performance, such as maximum bite force or running speed, determines the breadth of resources accessible to consumers, the outcome of interspecific interactions, and thus the structure of ecological networks. Climate change-induced impacts to ecosystem services and resilience are therefore on the horizon, mediated by disruption of biomechanical performance and, consequently, trophic interactions across whole ecosystems. Here, we argue that there is an urgent need to investigate the complex interactions between climate change, biomechanics and foraging ecology to help predict changes to ecological networks and ecosystem functioning. We discuss how these seemingly disparate disciplines can be connected through network science. To illustrate the interplay between ecology, environment and mechanics, we present an empirical example using an ant-plant network; we then use this example to demonstrate how warming, bite force and trophic interactions can be integrated through network science, and what this will achieve. It is our hope that this integrative framework will help to identify a viable means to elucidate previously intractable impacts of climate change, with effective predictive potential to guide management and mitigation.
Hopefully some more exciting research along these lines to come soon!
Foraging Ecology Research Group 