Food Web Complexity and Community Dynamics

Abstract

Food webs in nature have multiple, reticulate connections between a diversity of consumers and resources. Such complexity affects web dynamics: it first spreads the direct effects of consumption and productivity throughout the web rather than focusing them at particular levels. Second, consumer densities are often donor controlled with food from across the trophic spectrum, the herbivore and detrital channels, other habitats, life-history omnivory, and even trophic mutualism. Although consumers usually do not affect these resources, increased numbers often allow consumers to depress other resources to levels lower than if donor-controlled resources were absent. We propose that such donor-controlled and multichannel omnivory is a general feature of consumer control and central to food web dynamics. This observation is contrary to the normal practice of inferring dynamics by simplifying webs into a few linear levels, as per green world theories. Such theories do not accommodate commo...