Thomas Kiørboe
DTU-AQUA
Abstract:
Our limited intuition of the small-scale world of the plankton has biased the way we describe and understand ocean ecology. Classical approaches consider fluxes of energy and matter between species and populations to describe marine ecosystems but biological interactions occur between individuals rather than between the abstract entities we define. A complementary approach is therefore to derive system properties from mechanistic insights in individual functioning and interactions. Plankton live in a world that is radically different from ours and to which we have limited access. Visualization is central to developing an intuition for this world, which together with insights in small-scale fluid physics may allow a mechanistic understanding of individual interactions and deduction of properties of populations and ecosystems. I will demonstrate the approach through a look into this world and with various examples.