![]() ![]() Clearly this system is much simpler than a real food web, and climate change itself is more complex than just a direct temperature increase. The importance of the study is not in the details of the results, or its direct applicability to natural ecosystem. As the temperature increased, paramecium went extinct in the flask at an increasingly rapid pace. When they were together competing for food in the same jar, one of them, paramecium, was quickly outcompeted by the other. When they were alone, each microorganism predator easily survived to the end of the experiment. Roughly six weeks later, the results were in. Sets of microcosms were kept at five different temperatures to simulate a range of possible temperatures. To that end, researchers at Rutgers University created 240 microcosms, each containing three different species of bacteria and one or both of two different microorganism predators (another advantage of microcosms-you can easily build a lot of them). Understanding the impact on entire communities of organisms is even tougher. Take, for example, climate change. Predicting the impacts of climate change on an organism can be very tough since it depends on so many factors-what is happening where the organism lives, the interactions between different organisms, and so on. Microcosms are particularly helpful to ecologists and evolutionary biologists, since the system can be controlled experimentally in a way that the actual world cannot. These systems-in-a-jar, used to understand broader processes, are called microcosms. Microcosms can also easily be observed over multiple generations since the microorganisms within don’t live very long. Besides modeling the future, microcosms can be equally valuable in the present. ![]()
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