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Compensation masks trophic cascades in complex food webs

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Abstract

Ecological networks, or food webs, describe the feeding relationships between interacting species within an ecosystem. Understanding how the complexity of these networks influences their response to changing top-down control is a central challenge in ecology. Here, we provide a model-based investigation of trophic cascades — an oft-studied ecological phenomenon that occurs when changes in the biomass of top predators indirectly effect changes in the biomass of primary producers — in complex food webs that are representative of the structure of real ecosystems. Our results reveal that strong cascades occur primarily in low richness and weakly connected food webs, a result in agreement with some prior predictions. The primary mechanism underlying weak or absent cascades was a strong compensatory response; in most webs, predators induced large population level cascades that were masked by changes in the opposite direction by other species in the same trophic guild. Thus, the search for a general theory of trophic cascades in food webs should focus on uncovering features of real ecosystems that promote biomass compensation within functional guilds or trophic levels.

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Acknowledgments

We thank two reviewers for comments and Benjamin Baiser for useful discussions. This work resulted from the Dynamics of and on Networks workshop at the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, NM. AKF was supported by the University of California Office of the President, the National Science Foundation under award no. 006741-002 and the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation. KEA was supported by the University of California Academic Senate and the National Science Foundation under award no. DEB-1553718.

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Correspondence to Ashkaan K. Fahimipour.

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Appendix

Fig. 5
figure 5

Scatterplot matrix showing the relationships between the magnitude of producer compensation μ R and common topological features of food web structure (discussed in the main text). Weak and noisy correlations are visible in the top row of panels, indicating that topological web structure was a poor predictor of the system’s propensity for intraguild producer compensation

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Fahimipour, A.K., Anderson, K.E. & Williams, R.J. Compensation masks trophic cascades in complex food webs. Theor Ecol 10, 245–253 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12080-016-0326-8

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