06/14/2026
This week’s inspiration comes from PhD candidate Meredith Bennett, who studies the ecology of communities within intermittent streams. Meredith asked us to spotlight Dr. Mary Power, a professor at fellow land grant university, and an ecologist who has spent her career studying the function of whole ecosystems.
Dr. Power studied foraging ecology of crayfish during her PhD at the University of Washington and developed an early model of ideal free distribution in nature, which has remained an important modeling concept in ecology. She continues to study aquatic food webs with a focus on environmental drivers (temperature, flow, nutrient availability) at the University of California Berkeley and has received many awards and honors for her work including time spent as President of the Ecological Society of America.
In Meredith’s words, “What makes Dr. Power’s work so inspiring to me is how she emphasizes the power of species interactions to shape entire ecosystems. In her early career, she discovered one of the most well-known trophic cascades in aquatic ecology. In studies of Brier Creek in Oklahoma, she found that the presence of predatory Bass indirectly influences algal biomass by suppressing the foraging of Central Stonerollers, an algivorous minnow. As a fish ecologist working in southeast Oklahoma, this work was especially interesting to me and partly inspired an experiment I ran last summer! I found that predation risk influenced the likelihood of upstream movement of fish and crayfish following a rewetting event.”
Thank you, Meredith, for this week’s post!
