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2015 ; 5
(17
): 3842-56
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Exposing the structure of an Arctic food web
#MMPMID26380710
Wirta HK
; Vesterinen EJ
; Hambäck PA
; Weingartner E
; Rasmussen C
; Reneerkens J
; Schmidt NM
; Gilg O
; Roslin T
Ecol Evol
2015[Sep]; 5
(17
): 3842-56
PMID26380710
show ga
How food webs are structured has major implications for their stability and
dynamics. While poorly studied to date, arctic food webs are commonly assumed to
be simple in structure, with few links per species. If this is the case, then
different parts of the web may be weakly connected to each other, with
populations and species united by only a low number of links. We provide the
first highly resolved description of trophic link structure for a large part of a
high-arctic food web. For this purpose, we apply a combination of recent
techniques to describing the links between three predator guilds (insectivorous
birds, spiders, and lepidopteran parasitoids) and their two dominant prey orders
(Diptera and Lepidoptera). The resultant web shows a dense link structure and no
compartmentalization or modularity across the three predator guilds. Thus, both
individual predators and predator guilds tap heavily into the prey community of
each other, offering versatile scope for indirect interactions across different
parts of the web. The current description of a first but single arctic web may
serve as a benchmark toward which to gauge future webs resolved by similar
techniques. Targeting an unusual breadth of predator guilds, and relying on
techniques with a high resolution, it suggests that species in this web are
closely connected. Thus, our findings call for similar explorations of link
structure across multiple guilds in both arctic and other webs. From an applied
perspective, our description of an arctic web suggests new avenues for
understanding how arctic food webs are built and function and of how they respond
to current climate change. It suggests that to comprehend the community-level
consequences of rapid arctic warming, we should turn from analyses of
populations, population pairs, and isolated predator-prey interactions to
considering the full set of interacting species.
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