FIGURE 2.

A hypothetical example of how resource acquisition trade-offs interact with environmental conditions to determine community structure, with biogeochemical consequences. Monod growth curves are plotted for four species that exhibit an ‘opportunist-gleaner’ trade-off, where high maximum growth rate comes at a cost of reduced affinity. If nutrient supply shifts from relatively constant to highly variable, this shifts the relative fitness of the different strategies, with different species dominating under different conditions. Shifts in community composition may have biogeochemical impacts, such as reduced biomass N:P when opportunists dominate (growth rate hypothesis), or increased phytoplankton cell size (smaller cells tend to have higher affinity). A further possibility is that multiple strategies may coexist under variable nutrient supply, which is not depicted in the diagram.