Trophic species

Species are grouped trophically on the left, however distinctions such as herbivore and predator are merely the simplest definitions.

Trophic species are a scientific grouping of organisms according to their shared trophic (feeding) positions in a food web or food chain. Trophic species have identical prey and a shared set of predators in the food web. This means that members of a trophic species share many of the same kinds of ecological functions.[1][2] The idea of trophic species was first devised by Frederic Briand and Joel Cohen in 1984 when investigating scaling laws applying to food webs.[3] The category may include species of plants, animals, a combination of plants and animals, and biological stages of an organism. When assigning groups in a trophic manner, relationships are linear in scale, which allowed the same authors to predict the proportion of different trophic links in food webs.[4] Furthermore grouping similar species according to feeding habit rather than genetics results in a ratio of predator to prey that is generally 1:1 in food webs.[5]

References

  1. ^ Dunne, J. A.; Williams, R. J.; Martinez, N. D. (2002). "Food-web structure and network theory: The role of connectance and size". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 99 (20): 12917–12922. Bibcode:2002PNAS...9912917D. doi:10.1073/pnas.192407699. PMC 130560. PMID 12235364.
  2. ^ Pimm, S. L.; Lawton, J. H.; Cohen, J. E. (1991). "Food web patterns and their consequences" (PDF). Nature. 350 (6320): 669–674. Bibcode:1991Natur.350..669P. doi:10.1038/350669a0. S2CID 4267587.
  3. ^ Briand, F.; Cohen, J.E. (19 January 1984). "Community food webs have scale-invariant structure". Nature. 307 (5948): 264–267. Bibcode:1984Natur.307..264B. doi:10.1038/307264a0. S2CID 4319708.
  4. ^ Cohen, J. E.; Briand, F. (1984-07-01). "Trophic links of community food webs". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 81 (13): 4105–4109. Bibcode:1984PNAS...81.4105C. doi:10.1073/pnas.81.13.4105. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 345377. PMID 6588381.
  5. ^ Cohen, Joel; Briand, Frederic; Newman, Charles (1990). Community Food Webs. Springer Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg. p. 3. ISBN 3642837840. Briand and I devised and automated lumping procedure that puts together those biological species or other biological units of a web that eat the same kinds of prey and have the same kinds of predator


Stub icon

This ecology-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.