Noted: Researchers led by Stephen Carpenter of the University of Wisconsin?Madison recently experimentally tested the variance signal by adding more and more largemouth bass to a lake over a three-year period. The researchers took measurements of the light spectra of chlorophyll in the lake every five minutes (and in a control lake where they were not adding fish). Fifteen months before the food web of the whole lake shifted, the variance signal appeared in the chlorophyll measurements, Carpenter and his colleagues reported in Science last May.
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