Trophic redundancy in benthic fish food webs increases with scarcity of prey items, in the Southern Baltic Sea

Bottom trawling is one of the main pressures on benthic ecosystems, directly impacting targeted species and physically disturbing seabed invertebrate communities, in turn indirectly benthivorous fish entire food web structure functioning. To predict cascading effect bottom demersal it crucial to understand trophic interactions between invertebrates. Here, we assessed diet functioning two areas German Baltic Sea, Fehmarnbelt Odra Bank. The community characterized by a high number biomass, contrary Bank which poor with individual abundance but low biomass. We used mixing models based stable isotopes carbon nitrogen combined stomach content analyses estimate at both sites, community-wide indices, derived from compare webs. show that can chose preferential prey items, resulting higher diversity, Bank, feed all available species, redundancy. found generalist behavior likely result scarcity being small individuals. demonstrate differences sites was mainly driven characteristics communities.