What's in a tide pool? Just as much food web network complexity as in large open ecosystems.

Vanessa Mendonça,Ana Silva,João Canning-Clode,Philippe Archambault,Fanny Vermandele,Marta Dias,Augusto A V Flores,Catarina Vinagre,Carolina Madeira,Awantha Dissanayake

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0200066

Abstract

Understanding the fundamental laws that govern complex food web networks over large ecosystems presents high costs and oftentimes unsurmountable logistical challenges. This way, it is crucial to find smaller systems that can be used as proxy food webs. Intertidal rock pool environments harbour particularly high biodiversity over small areas. This study aimed to analyse their food web networks to investigate their potential as proxies of larger ecosystems for food web networks research. Highly resolved food webs were compiled for 116 intertidal rock pools from cold, temperate, subtropical and tropical regions, to ensure a wide representation of environmental variability. The network properties of these food webs were compared to that of estuaries, lakes and rivers, as well as marine and terrestrial ecosystems (46 previously published complex food webs). The intertidal rock pool food webs analysed presented properties that were in the same range as the previously published food webs. The niche model predictive success was remarkably high (73–88%) and similar to that previously found for much larger marine and terrestrial food webs. By using a large-scale sampling effort covering 116 intertidal rock pools in several biogeographic regions, this study showed, for the first time, that intertidal rock pools encompass food webs that share fundamental organizational characteristics with food webs from markedly different, larger, open and abiotically stable ecosystems. As small, self-contained habitats, intertidal rock pools are particularly tractable systems and therefore a large number of food webs can be examined with relatively low sampling effort. This study shows, for the first time that they can be useful models for the understanding of universal processes that regulate the complex network organization of food webs, which are harder or impossible to investigate in larger, open ecosystems, due to high costs and logistical difficulties.

Highlights

Comparative analysis of food webs from different habitats has revealed generalities in the subjacent network structure of trophic interactions
The comparison of the range of food web network properties among intertidal rock pools and other ecosystems, reported in previous works (Table 1), showed that intertidal rock pools’ properties are generally within the range estimated for other ecosystems
The number of trophic species (S) observed in intertidal rock pools was considerably lower, 7–52, than that reported for all other ecosystems, 25–245, such number of trophic species refers to much smaller areas (Table 1)

Summary

Introduction

Comparative analysis of food webs from different habitats has revealed generalities in the subjacent network structure of trophic interactions. Marine, stream, lake, and terrestrial ecosystems all seem to share similar general properties of complex food web network structure [1,2,3,4,5]. Food web network properties are scale-dependent, changing as diversity and complexity change [8, 9] and direct comparisons can be misleading. [3] demonstrated that marine food webs are not different from nonmarine food webs, by comparing their fit to the theoretical niche food web model [1]. The niche model incorporates scale-dependence, allowing the comparison of food webs with different diversity and complexity

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Conclusion