Manipulating Interaction Strengths and the Consequences for Trivariate Patterns in a Marine Food Web

O’Gorman, Eoin J.; Emmerson, Mark

doi:10.1016/b978-0-12-381363-3.00006-x

Cited by 43 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 291 publications

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“…Rarity-for-size might therefore help to identify especially vulnerable taxa, without necessarily requiring detailed a priori knowledge of trophic position or environmental tolerances. This could be useful for assessing impacts of stressors in ecological networks in general, and warrants further exploration in systems exposed to perturbations or environmental stress where M and N data exist [17,18].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Their reduced abundance or extinction has particularly important implications for aquatic food webs, which are often strongly size-structured [15][16][17][18][19][20][21]. For instance, changes in the mass and abundance of consumers and resources can trigger dramatic changes, including trophic cascades and secondary extinctions [4,10,17].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Quantifying allometric relationships between the abundance and body mass of interacting species therefore offers a potentially powerful means of gauging responses to perturbations and assessing how structural change might be linked to dynamical properties [20]. One way to quantify the size structure of trophic networks is via the construction of 'trivariate food webs', in which species populations are plotted on log-log body massabundance (MN) axes as nodes that are connected via feeding links [15,17,18,[20][21][22]. Within this log-scale MN space allometric scaling relationships can be quantified at different organizational levels, from feeding links between species populations, to food chains and coarser-grained attributes of the whole food web [20,21].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Climate change impacts in multispecies systems: drought alters food web size structure in a field experiment

Woodward

Brown

Edwards

et al. 2012

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Experimental data from intergenerational field manipulations of entire food webs are scarce, yet such approaches are essential for gauging impacts of environmental change in natural systems. We imposed 2 years of intermittent drought on stream channels in a replicated field trial, to measure food web responses to simulated climate change. Drought triggered widespread losses of species and links, with larger taxa and those that were rare for their size, many of which were predatory, being especially vulnerable. Many network properties, including size -scaling relationships within food chains, changed in response to drought. Other properties, such as connectance, were unaffected. These findings highlight the need for detailed experimental data from different organizational levels, from pairwise links to the entire food web. The loss of not only large species, but also those that were rare for their size, provides a newly refined way to gauge likely impacts that may be applied more generally to other systems and/or impacts.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Climate change impacts in multispecies systems: drought alters food web size structure in a field experiment

Woodward

Brown

Edwards

et al. 2012

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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“…feeding on several trophic level) and opportunistic predator (Allen, 1899;Forster, 1959;Comely and Ansell, 1988). Variable foraging behaviour such as omnivory can be of critical importance in strengthening food web interactions, including cascading effects (Emmerson and Yearsley, 2004;Bruno and O'Connor, 2005;O'Gorman and Emmerson, 2010). For instance, it has been proposed, on the base of modelled food webs, that stable community should be favoured since omnivorous interactions are weak (Emmerson and Yearsley, 2004).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For instance, it has been proposed, on the base of modelled food webs, that stable community should be favoured since omnivorous interactions are weak (Emmerson and Yearsley, 2004). In complex coastal mesocosm communities, manipulating the abundance of strong interactors, such as predator echinoderms, has been shown to skew food web properties without any impact on species richness (O'Gorman and Emmerson, 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Community, trophic structure and functioning in two contrasting Laminaria hyperborea forests

Leclerc

Riera

Laurans

et al. 2015

Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science

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Abstract:Worldwide kelp forests have been the fields of several studies concerning ecosystems dysfunction in the past decades. Multifactorial kelp threats have been described and include deforestation due to human impact, cascading effect and climate change. Here, we compared community and trophic structure in two contrasting kelp forests off the coasts of Brittany. One has been harvested five years before sampling and shelters abundant omnivorous predators, nearly absent from the other, which has been treated as preserved from kelp harvest. δ 15 N analyses conducted on the overall communities were linked to the tropho-functional structure of different strata featuring these forests (stipe and holdfast of canopy kelp and rock). Our results yielded site-to-site differences of community and tropho-functional structures across kelp strata, particularly contrasting in terms of biomass on the understorey. Likewise, isotope analyses inferred the top trophic position of Marthasterias glacialis and Echinus esculentus which may be considered as strong interactors in the sub-canopy. Our intention is to discuss these patterns and propose a series of probable and testable alternative hypotheses to explain them. For instance, we propose that differences of trophic structure and functioning result from confounded effects of contrasting wave dissipation depending on kelp size-density structure and community cascading involving these omnivorous predators. Given the species diversity and complexity of food web highlighted in these habitats, we call for further comprehensive research about the overall strata and tropho-functional groups for conservation management in kelp forests.

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Multitrophic diversity sustains ecological complexity by dampening top‐down control of a shallow marine benthic food web

O’Gorman

2021

Ecology

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Biodiversity is typically considered as a one‐dimensional metric (e.g., species richness), yet the consequences of species loss may be different depending on where extinctions occur in the food web. Here, I used a manipulative field experiment in a temperate subtidal marine system to explore the implications of diversity loss at multiple trophic levels for ecosystem functioning and food web structure. The four manipulated predators included the small painted goby and common prawn, which are also fed on by the larger black goby and shore crab. Antagonistic interactions between the manipulated predators (e.g., intraguild predation, intimidation, interference competition) limited their negative effects on the rest of the food web. Top‐down control was so suppressed at the highest level of multitrophic diversity that the resulting food webs were as complex and productive as those containing no manipulated predators. Negative interactions between the predators weakened as multitrophic diversity decreased, however, resulting in stronger consumption of lower trophic levels and a simpler food web with lower rates of two key ecosystem processes: primary production and decomposition. These results show how indirect interactions between predators on multiple trophic levels help to promote the complexity and functioning of natural systems.

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Manipulating Interaction Strengths and the Consequences for Trivariate Patterns in a Marine Food Web

Cited by 43 publications

References 291 publications

Climate change impacts in multispecies systems: drought alters food web size structure in a field experiment

Climate change impacts in multispecies systems: drought alters food web size structure in a field experiment

Community, trophic structure and functioning in two contrasting Laminaria hyperborea forests

Multitrophic diversity sustains ecological complexity by dampening top‐down control of a shallow marine benthic food web

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