We summarize research on diversity and trophic interactions under a trophic cascades model that is reframed and expanded from the traditional biomassor abundancebased indirect effects and discuss the response of such ―diversity cascades‖ to climate change and other global change parameters. The studies we summarize encompass dynamic processes in which species richness or evenness in one trophic...

PURPOSE To characterize secretion of in situ retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) from healthy, aged adult, age-related macular degeneration (AMD) adult, and fetal donor eyes and to assess the impact on retinal survival in vitro. METHODS Conditioned medium (CM) was collected from adult and fetal donor eyes and analyzed for trophic factor composition by multiplex ELISA. Trophic factor receptor occ...

Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) are of great environmental concern due to the exponential increase of the concentrations in the environment, especially in high trophic level organisms, and the trophodynamics of these chemicals in aquatic food webs is an important criterion for assessing their ecological risk. This study analyzed 13 PBDEs in the zooplankton, five invertebrate species, six...

Whereas PNS neurons in culture are intrinsically responsive to peptide trophic factors, retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) are not unless they are depolarized, or their intracellular levels of cyclic AMP (cAMP) are elevated. We show here that depolarization increases cAMP in cultured RGCs sufficiently to enhance their responsiveness and that the trophic responsiveness of developing RGCs in intact re...

Ratio-dependent and prey-dependent models of trophic interactions make very different predictions about the steady-state (equilibrial) properties of ecosystems, such as the response of equilibrium abundance and biomass of organisms in each trophic level to increased primary productivity or nutrient input. Prey-dependent heory predicts alternating positive, negative, and zero responses of trophi...

1. Understanding the trophic status of consumers in freshwater habitats is central to understanding their ecological roles and significance. Tadpoles are a diverse and abundant component of many freshwater habitats, yet we know relatively little about their feeding ecology and true trophic status compared with many other consumer groups. While many tadpole species are labelled herbivores or det...

The generality of the trophic cascade has been an intensely debated topic among ecologists. We conducted a meta-analysis of 54 separate enclosure and pond experiments that measured the response of the zooplankton and phytoplankton to zooplanktivorous fish treatments. These results provide unequivocal support for the trophic cascade hypothesis in freshwater food webs. Zooplanktivorous fish treat...

Invasive species can cause substantial ecological impacts on native biodiversity. While ecological theory attempts to explain the processes involved in the trophic integration of invaders into native food webs and their competitive impacts on resident species, results are equivocal. In addition, quantifying the relative strength of impacts from non-native species (interspecific competition) ver...

..................................................................................................................................... ii Co-Authorship Statement...........................................................................................................iii Acknowledgments .................................................................................................................