How Views about Flow Adaptations of Benthic Stream Invertebrates Changed over the Last Century
✍ Scribed by Bernhard Statzner
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2008
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 355 KB
- Volume
- 93
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1434-2944
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Abstract
Throughout the last century, stream ecologists tried to answer the question: how do benthic invertebrates cope with the flows prevailing in streams? Whereas the pioneers frequently sought answers using imagination and speculation in a hefty debate, subsequent research on flow adaptations of stream invertebrates relied increasingly on the transfer of concepts (from fluid mechanics to stream ecology) and technological innovations. Correspondingly, views about flow adaptations of stream invertebrates changed considerably over the last century. However, stream ecologists are still far from understanding how stream invertebrates are adapted to the many different flow conditions they face during their life, because the near‐bottom flows they experience are extremely complex and create so diverse constraints that adaptation to all of them is physically impossible.
This instance shows how ignorant we are of the physical factors in the environment which ultimately shape the organisms, and how difficult it is to understand the utility of a structure without knowing the requirements for which it is produced
Sunder Lal Hora, 1930 (© 2008 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)