Previous Article |
Table of Contents
| Next Article 
From the Cover
BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES / ECOLOGY
Size, foraging, and food web structure
*Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, Alfred Denny Building, University of Sheffield, Western Bank, Sheffield S10 2TN, United Kingdom; and Department of Biology, Darmstadt University of Technology, Schnittspahnstrasse 10, 64287 Darmstadt, Germany
Edited by James H. Brown, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, and approved January 22, 2008 (received for review November 9, 2007)
Understanding what structures ecological communities is vital to answering questions about extinctions, environmental change, trophic cascades, and ecosystem functioning. Optimal foraging theory was conceived to increase such understanding by providing a framework with which to predict species interactions and resulting community structure. Here, we use an optimal foraging model and allometries of foraging variables to predict the structure of real food webs. The qualitative structure of the resulting model provides a more mechanistic basis for the phenomenological rules of previous models. Quantitative analyses show that the model predicts up to 65% of the links in real food webs. The deterministic nature of the model allows analysis of the model's successes and failures in predicting particular interactions. Predacious and herbivorous feeding interactions are better predicted than pathogenic, parasitoid, and parasitic interactions. Results also indicate that accurate prediction and modeling of some food webs will require incorporating traits other than body size and diet choice models specific to different types of feeding interaction. The model results support the hypothesis that individual behavior, subject to natural selection, determines individual diets and that food web structure is the sum of these individual decisions.
body size | complexity | connectance
Author contributions: O.L.P., A.P.B., and P.H.W. designed research; O.L.P., A.P.B., J.O.R., and P.H.W. performed research; O.L.P., A.P.B., J.O.R., and P.H.W. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; O.L.P. analyzed data; and O.L.P., A.P.B., and P.H.W. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
See Commentary on page 4079.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/0710672105/DC1.
To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: o.petchey{at}shef.ac.uk
© 2008 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA
CiteULike 
Complore 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us 
Digg What's this?
Related Commentary in PNAS:
This article has been cited by other articles in HighWire Press-hosted journals:
|
|
 |
|
  E. L. Berlow, U. Brose, and N. D. Martinez The "Goldilocks factor" in food webs PNAS, March 18, 2008; 105(11): 4079 - 4080. [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
