Food web laws or niche theory? Six independent empirical tests.

Notes and Comments: Food Web Laws or Niche Theory? Six Independent Empirical Tests

Some Properties of the Speciation Model for Food-Web Structure

We present a mathematical analysis of the speciation model for food-web structure, which had in previous work been shown to yield a good description of empirical data of food-web topology. The degree distributions of the network are derived. The properties of the speciation model are compared to those of other models that successfully describe empirical data. It is argued that the speciation mo...

A landscape theory for food web architecture.

Ecologists have long searched for structures and processes that impart stability in nature. In particular, food web ecology has held promise in tackling this issue. Empirical patterns in food webs have consistently shown that the distributions of species and interactions in nature are more likely to be stable than randomly constructed systems with the same number of species and interactions. Fo...

Evidence for the existence of a robust pattern of prey selection in food webs.

Food webs aim to provide a thorough representation of the trophic interactions found in an ecosystem. The complexity of empirical food webs, however, is leading many ecologists to focus dynamic ecosystem studies on smaller microcosm or mesocosm studies based upon community modules, which comprise three to five species and the interactions likely to have ecological relevance. We provide here a s...

The Probabilistic Niche Model Reveals the Niche Structure and Role of Body Size in a Complex Food Web

The niche model has been widely used to model the structure of complex food webs, and yet the ecological meaning of the single niche dimension has not been explored. In the niche model, each species has three traits, niche position, diet position and feeding range. Here, a new probabilistic niche model, which allows the maximum likelihood set of trait values to be estimated for each species, is...