Complexity vs linearity: relations between functional traits in a heterotrophic protist.

Background: Functional traits are phenotypic traits that affect an organism's performance and shape ecosystem-level processes. The main challenge when using functional traits to quantify biodiversity is to choose which ones to measure since effort and money are limited. As one way of dealing with this, Hodgson et al.

The ontogeny of tolerance curves: habitat quality vs. acclimation in a stressful environment.

Stressful environments affect life-history components of fitness through (i) instantaneous detrimental effects, (ii) historical (carry-over) effects and (iii) history-by-environment interactions, including acclimation effects. The relative contributions of these different responses to environmental stress are likely to change along life, but such ontogenic perspective is often overlooked in studies of tolerance curves, precluding a better understanding of the causes of costs of acclimation, and more generally of fitness in temporally fine-grained environments. We performed an experiment in the brine shrimp Artemia to disentangle these different contributions to environmental tolerance, and investigate how they unfold along life.