Stable isotopes are increasingly being used to unlock the wealth of information contained in specimens preserved in museum collections. However, preservation methods that employ formalin may confound ecological interpretations. To quantify the …
Food webs are extraordinarily complex, containing myriad direct interactions and indirect effects. Determining how this network of interactions and effects influences a food web’s qualitative dynamics is a challenging task, especially because data …
Functional responses relate a consumer's feeding rates to variation in its abiotic and biotic environment, providing insight into consumer behaviour and fitness, and underpinning population and food‐web dynamics. Despite their broad relevance and …
Theory suggests that intraspecific trait variation will alter species interaction strengths through nonlinear averaging when interaction strengths are nonlinear functions of individuals' traits. This effect is expected to be widespread, yet what …
Functional responses are a cornerstone to our understanding of consumer-resource interactions, so how to best describe them using models has been actively debated. Here we focus on the consumer dependence of functional responses to evidence …
Although parasites are increasingly recognized for their ecosystem roles, it is often assumed that free-living organisms dominate animal biomass in most ecosystems and therefore provide the primary pathways for energy transfer. To examine the …
Species interactions in food webs are usually recognized as dynamic, varying across species, space, and time because of biotic and abiotic drivers. Yet food webs also show emergent properties that appear consistent, such as a skewed frequency …
Diet variation among individuals within populations is widespread. Often diet dierences among individuals are attributable to obvious differences among individuals such as age, sex, or morphology. However, growing evidence suggests that individual …
Describing the mechanisms that drive variation in species interaction strengths is central to understanding, predicting, and managing community dynamics. Multiple factors have been linked to trophic interaction strength variation, including species …