Excited to get to work with you!!

Thanks Tim! Excited to get to know all the MI wildlife!

Thanks @alisoncribb.bsky.social! Can’t wait to hear what you think!!

Thanks @jonathan-farr.bsky.social !! 🦬

The bottom line: zoogeochemical niche construction offers a way to understand how animals, through their elemental legacies, can influence not just ecosystems—but their own evolutionary trajectories.

We outline experimental, correlative, and comparative approaches to identify and test these dynamics, providing ecologists with tools to discover new eco-evolutionary feedbacks and revisit old hypotheses about animal behavior and movements.

Our contribution: the Zoogeochemical Niche Construction Framework. We link animal-driven changes in elemental cycles to nutritional ecology, fitness, and ultimately evolutionary processes.

But here’s the catch: despite both focusing on feedbacks between organisms and environments, niche construction and zoogeochemistry have mostly developed in isolation. This means we know little about the evolutionary consequences of animal-driven nutrient cycling.

Meanwhile, zoogeochemistry has shown that animals are powerful drivers of element redistribution and cycling. Think salmon carrying marine nutrients into forests or seabirds fertilizing islands.

Niche construction theory tells us that organisms can influence their own evolution by modifying their habitats. Classic examples include earthworms changing soil structure or beavers building dams.