Biology Seminar - Tyler Kartzinel
SENG 113
gkozak@umassd.edu
Trophic ecology underpins many of the most fundamental processes in biology and environmental science—from biodiversity to the evolution of specialization and the flow of energy through ecosystems—yet dietary data are often too sparse and taxonomically coarse to support generalization. I will introduce the theory of dietary niche partitioning and how it relates to the struggle for coexistence based on my early work involving the large mammalian herbivores of Kenya. Using dietary DNA metabarcoding to resolve complex plant–herbivore interactions, this work revealed that even the herbivores with the most superficially similar diets can nevertheless partition their diets in ways that help explain their coexistence in African savannas. In contrast, our current research in Yellowstone—North America’s most diverse contemporary large-herbivore community—revealed unexpectedly high levels of dietary overlap: individuals of different species sometimes shared more dietary taxa with each other than they did with other members of their own species. Yet because their diets are so taxonomically rich, we found that the nutritional components of their diets still reveal unique nutritional niche spaces that members of each species can occupy despite substantial overlap in the plant species that each consumes. I will discuss how novel applications of dietary DNA metabarcoding in the context of nutritional ecology can uncover otherwise cryptic dimensions of the trophic niche in ways that can help reconcile divergent results to better support fundamental advances in ecology and evolution.