An explanatory model for food-web structure and evolution

Details An explanatory model for food-web structure and evolution An explanatory model for food-web structure and evolution

2004-10-26

arxiv.org/abs/q-bio/0410030v2

Ecological Complexity 2, 312-321 (2005)

Biology

Quantitative Biology

Populations and Evolution

16 pages, 3 figures

Scientific paper

10.1016/j.ecocom.2005.04.007

Food webs are networks describing who is eating whom in an ecological community. By now it is clear that many aspects of food-web structure are reproducible across diverse habitats, yet little is known about the driving force behind this structure. Evolutionary and population dynamical mechanisms have been considered. We propose a model for the evolutionary dynamics of food-web topology and show that it accurately reproduces observed food-web characteristic in the steady state. It is based on the observation that most consumers are larger than their resource species and the hypothesis that speciation and extinction rates decrease with increasing body mass. Results give strong support to the evolutionary hypothesis.

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