Event

http://www.jamstec.go.jp/res/ress/lanimal/

"Phytoplankton (free floating algae) account for 50% of photosynthesis on the planet and they are a critical sink for atmospheric CO2. Though plankton are small, and lack brains, they have in their DNA the ability to survive a wide variety of changes in environmental conditions (they have made it through many ice ages!) by adjusting their internal physiology. This has implications for the diversity and productivity of the oceans, nutrient and potentially carbon flows in the environment.  I will briefly introduce and review the optimality-based approach to modeling plankton, a new theory in marine sciences. Based on the assumption that natural selection tends to produce organisms optimally adapted to their environments, we consider optimality as a guiding concept for modeling aquatic micro-organisms (plankton).  Trade-offs, usually physiological and sometimes ecological, are essential to this approach. It is closely related to trait-based ecology, which regards traits and functionality as the result of the optimization inherent in natural selection.  This approach is particularly well suited to plankton, because of their long evolutionary history.  I will review recent modeling studies of planktonic organisms that have been based on the assumption that adaptation of species and acclimation of organisms maximize growth rate, subject to trade-offs, and propose that the trade-offs serve as ‘hyper-parameterizations’, which constrain the adaptive response in such models.  Compared to mechanistic models not formulated in terms of optimality, this approach has in some cases yielded simpler models with greater generality.  I’ll present examples of optimality-based models that can be incorporated into large-scale models (e.g., Earth-system models) and discuss the expected benefits (e.g. improved nutrient and potentially carbon cycling) as well as associated challenges.”