Chengdu Institute of Biology ecologist Dr Chuan Zhao has won a British Ecological Society Young Investigator prize. The prize – one of only five awarded each year – recognises the best research papers published in BES journals by early career scientists.
Zhao won the Elton Prize for the best paper in the BES's Journal of Animal Ecology in 2013 for his paper on how predatory beetles facilitate plant growth by driving earthworms to lower soil layers.
In the paper, Zhao and colleagues tested the hypothesis that predators will have negative effects on plants by suppressing detritivores in a Tibetan alpine meadow, and they did this by manipulating predatory beetles and examining indirect effects transmitted through their earthworm prey.
The prize, which is includes ￡250, a year's BES membership plus a year's subscription to the journal, will be presented at the BES’s annual meeting at Lille, France, in December.
According to the journal editors, who judged the prize: “We liked the neat design of this experimental study and the interesting results that emerged, which did not accord with conventional theory. This work also adds a completely novel aspect to the highly topical issue of how predators influence plants and ultimately ecosystem functioning in terrestrial ecosystems.”
The paper showed that predators enhanced the positive effects of detritivores on plants, demonstrating a plausible and interesting mechanism to explain this counter-intuitive result: a non-consumptive effect, by which the largely aboveground predatory beetles drive earthworms deep into the soil in a bid to escape predation risk, leading to increased porosity, water content and available nutrients in the otherwise barren lower soil layer.
The paper formed part of Zhao’s PhD dissertation. He is currently a research assistant in Chengdu Institute of Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and plans to continue studying trophic interactions in the alpine detritus system.