An authoritative and up-to-date exploration of how the competition-defence trade-off has shaped the marine microbial food web In The Marine Microbial Food Web: Competition and Defence as Shaping Forces from Ecosystem to Genes, distinguished researcher Tron Frede Thingstad delivers an insightful and practical discussion of the microbial portion of the oceans food web. The author describes how specific factors, including evolution, biodiversity, organism life strategies, genome organization, biogeochemistry, food web structure, and population dynamics, can be understood as the consequences of the balance between competition and defence. Using modular idealized mathematical models developed from classical Lotka-Volterra formulations, the book describes models that explain the balance between production and consumption of organic material in the photic zone and the potential for export to the oceans interior.
