An explanatory model for food-web structure and evolution

Abstract 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 characteristics 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.

• Publication year

  2004

• Venue

  Ecological Complexity

• Publication date

  2004-10-26

• Fields of study

  Biology, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.ecocom.2005.04.007arXiv q-bio/0410030
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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