What does 'autotroph' mean?

We examine the sensitivity of the seasonal cycle of heterotrophic respiration to model estimates of litterfall seasonality, herbivory, plant allocation, tissue chemistry, and land use. As a part of ...

Scientists have discovered a thriving and previously unknown ecosystem in the planet’s deepest ocean trenches, feeding on organic debris from above. At those depths the pressure is enough to crush a ...

Researchers have uncovered surprising evidence that the deep ocean’s carbon-fixing engine works very differently than long assumed. While ammonia-oxidizing archaea were thought to dominate carbon ...

Life on Earth blooms with wild ingenuity. From phosphorescent fungi feeding in the undergrowth to chameleons flicking tongues at unsuspecting prey, every organism carves out its own strategy to ...

Mushrooms, neither plants nor animals, belong to the fascinating kingdom of fungi. These heterotrophs obtain nutrients by decomposing organic matter, playing a vital role in nutrient cycling. Unlike ...

Arcellinida shelled amoebae are heterotrophic microbial eukaryotes with an extensive Neoproterozoic fossil record, the vase-shaped microfossils (VSMs), a diverse group that is abundant and widespread ...

Autumn is an independent journalist and educator who writes about climate, wildlife, biodiversity, and environmental justice and policy. In ecology, biotic and abiotic factors encompass all the living ...

Fungi is all around us if you know where to look - mushrooms in forests, mould on bread - but many are inconspicuous or invisible to the naked eye. This might explain why they're so often overlooked ...

Microbial heterotrophs (‘picoheterotrophs’) drive global carbon cycling, but how to quantitatively organize their functional complexity remains unclear. Here, we generate a global -scale, mechanistic ...