Small world patterns in food webs.

The analysis of some species-rich, well-defined food webs shows that they display the so-called small world behavior shared by a number of disparate complex systems. The three systems analysed (Ythan estuary web, Silwood web and the Little Rock lake web) have different levels of taxonomic resolution, but all of them involve high clustering and short path lengths (near two degrees of separation) between species. Additionally, the distribution of connections P(k) which is skewed in all the webs analysed shows long tails indicative of power-law scaling. These features suggest that communities might be self-organized in a non-random fashion that might have important consequences in their resistance to perturbations (such as species removal). The consequences for ecological theory are outlined.

• Publication year

  2000

• Venue

  Journal of Theoretical Biology

• Publication date

  2000-11-10

• Fields of study

  Biology, Physics, Geography, Environmental Science, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1006/JTBI.2001.2460arXiv cond-mat/0011195PMID 11846598
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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