Abstract
Fifty years ago, Robert Treat Paine published his seminal paper on food web complexity and biodiversity (Paine 1966). In this work, Paine used sea stars to illustrate how relationships among species were key determinants of emergent ecological patterns, and in so doing he injected a healthy dose of testable mechanism into a field that was largely phenomenological at the time. The example of the sea star Pisaster ochraceus as a keystone predator (Paine 1966, 1969) remains a standard example in Ecology textbooks, and undergraduates who take ecology courses today are likely to associate the name Paine with starfish. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
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