RIVERSIDE: Ecology research paper wins national award
Ashkaan Fahimipour is a a fourth-year Ph.D. student in UC Riverside’s Department of Biology.
COURTESY OF JOHN PAUL GONZALEZ
In May, Ashkaan K. Fahimipour, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in UC Riverside’s Department of Biology, and a colleague published a research paper in Ecology Letters, a top ecology journal.
In their work, they manipulated many ecosystems at once to examine how the connections between species change over time. “The Dynamics of Assembling Food Webs” has been selected as this year’s recipient of the Thomas M. Frost Award for Excellence in Graduate Research, sponsored by the aquatic section of the Ecological Society of America. Named for a creative scientist, the prize honors his commitment to aquatic ecology and graduate student education.
Fahimipour and co-author Andrew M. Hein of Princeton University were to be honored last week in Sacramento at the society’s 99th annual meeting.
“This study is really important because Ashkaan and his colleague followed the linkages among the species over a long time span. I know of no other experiment that does this,” said Kurt E. Anderson, an assistant professor of biology at UCR and Fahimipour’s adviser.
Fahimipour said ecosystems are collections of plants, animals and other living things that grow and interact with one another around us.
“If we’re going to avoid destroying the environment around us, we need to understand how species are linked to one another and how our actions affect these linkages,” he said. “But it’s hard to look at a whole ecosystem such as an Alaskan forest or an African savanna at once because they are so big.”
In their study, one of the few to look at how linkages between species change through time, Fahimipour and Hein studied small ponds (42 plastic wading pools) and more than 130 species – including algae, zooplankton, microcrustaceans, mosquitoes, flies, beetles, dragonflies, tadpoles and hitch-hiking mites – they encountered living in them. They found many patterns that have never been seen before, such as changes in the network structure of interacting plants and animals within these ecosystems.
Fahimipour and Hein added species (a mixture of zooplankton and insects) to half of their artificial ponds. In the remaining half they added no species. They then tracked all the species in all the ponds for about 10 weeks, which allowed them to study how species’ interactions changed over the course of the experiment.
“What our experiments showed us is that life is unfair in these little ponds – to put it simply,” Fahimipour said. “A few species consume almost all of the resources and thrived. The rest did not, and dwindled in number.”
Because ecosystems are always changing, Fahimipour and Hein conclude that an ecosystem has to be examined more than once to understand how it works.
Funding for the research was provided by the National Science Foundation. UC Riverside’s Department of Biology and the Center for Conservation Biology also supported the study.
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