How the direct and indirect effects of species interactions cascade to affect community struc- ture, functioning, and stability is a fundamental question in ecology. In temperate kelp forests, species interactions, in conjunction with environmental …
The assessment of relative model performance using information criteria like AIC and BIC has become routine among functional-response studies, reflecting trends in the broader ecological literature. Such information criteria allow comparison across …
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 …