Food-web assembly and collapse: mathematical models and implications for conservation

One c collaps For thirty years I have read publications about this spate of invasions; and many of them preserve the atmosphere of first-hand reporting by people who have actually seen them happening, and give a feeling of urgency and scale that is absent from the drier summaries of text-books. We must make no mistake: we are seeing one of the great historical convulsions in the world’s fauna and flora. We might say, with Professor Challenger, standing on Conan Doyle’s ‘Lost World’, with his black beard jutting out: ‘We have been privileged to be present at one of the typical decisive battles of history—the battles which have determined the fate of the world’. But how will it be decisive? Will it be a Lost World? These are questions that ecologists ought to try to answer. Elton (1958, pp. 31–32)