Dr. Silke Van den Wyngaert
Research Silke Van den Wyngaert:My research interests are broadly focused on interactions between aquatic organisms and the impact on ecosystems such interactions may have. During my master thesis I studied competitive interactions between freshwater heterotrophic bacteria and the toxic cyanobacteria Planktothrix rubescens in Lake Zürich. During my PhD I got fascinated by a more “evil” kind of interaction, namely fungal parasitism on a diatom. The fact that parasites can have pronounced effects on their host population is now well established. How this may influence ecosystem properties is however less clear. The importance of predation for community structure and ecosystem productivity through trophic cascades has been extensively investigated. Acknowledging that parasites can have similar effects, comparisons between predator and parasite induced changes in trophic structure has rarely been studied in aquatic ecosystems. During my postdoctoral project I want to get more insight in the role played by zooplankton parasites in modifying trophic interactions and ecosystem properties. The study site is situated in the region of the Humedales del Este (Eastern Wetlands) in Uruguay and covers a variety of temporal ponds, which are highly connected. A field survey will characterize the keystone zooplankton species, their parasites and distribution. A peculiarity of these ponds is the presence of small killifish. This allows us to manipulate the absence/presence of fish predation in the field in order to see if this affects levels of parasite prevalence and changes in trophic structure. With a mesocosm experiment we want to investigate the single and combined effects of parasites and predators on trophic structure. We are particularly interested if parasites alone can induce changes in trophic structure and when yes, do they change it in a similar way as predators?
My Publications:
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