Ecology 6th Edition by Charles Krebs

Exercise 7

Many studies of nutrient limitation in freshwater lakes and in the ocean use small water bottles as experimental units to which nutrients of various types are added. Other aquatic ecologists use mesocosms of plastic that hold several cubic meters of water for their experiments. Discuss why these small-scale experiments might give less reliable results than whole-lake manipulations. Schindler (1998) and Howarth and Marino (2006) discuss the scale problem for freshwater lakes and coastal marine ecosystems.