Prediction of planktonic protistan grazing rates

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Abstract
Data on planktonic protistan feeding were gathered from the literature and multiple regression statistics used to find a model that would predict ingestion rates over a wide range of biological and environmental conditions. The proposed model (with an R2 = 0.75) includes temperature and cell volumes and concentrations of both prey and predator as explanatory variables. Data from a lotic system departed from the rest of the data set, but marine and lentic systems were indistinguishable. Whether the grazing experiments were done with direct or indirect methods was not important. All continuous variables presented a power relationship with respect to ingestion rate with the exception of temperature, which had an exponential relationship. Prey concentration had a direct effect on ingestion rates, although these did not show the saturation of a typical hyperbolic relationship, most likely due to the nature of the data and the statistical model itself. Larger predator concentrations as well as larger prey cell volumes resulted in decreased ingestion rates.

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