scholarly journals New mapping metrics to test functional response of food webs to coastal restoration

Food Webs ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. e00179
Author(s):  
James A. Nelson ◽  
J. Mason Harris ◽  
Justin S. Lesser ◽  
W. Ryan James ◽  
Glenn M. Suir ◽  
...  
Author(s):  
John P. DeLong

Predator-prey interactions form an essential part of ecological communities, determining the flow of energy from autotrophs to top predators. The rate of predation is a key regulator of that energy flow, and that rate is determined by the functional response. Functional responses themselves are emergent ecological phenomena – they reflect morphology, behavior, and physiology of both predator and prey and are both outcomes of evolution and the source of additional evolution. The functional response is thus a concept that connects many aspects of biology from behavioral ecology to eco-evolutionary dynamics to food webs, and as a result, the functional response is the key to an integrative science of predatory ecology. In this book, I provide a synthesis of research on functional responses, starting with the basics. I then break the functional response down into foraging components and connect these to the traits and behaviors that connect species in food webs. I conclude that contrary to appearances, we know very little about functional responses, and additional work is necessary for us to understand how environmental change and management will impact ecological systems


2004 ◽  
Vol 61 (11) ◽  
pp. 2215-2226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy E Essington ◽  
Sture Hansson

Predator-dependent functional responses decouple predation mortality from fluctuations in predator abundance and therefore can prevent strong "top-down" interaction strengths in food webs. We evaluated whether contrasts in the functional response of Baltic Sea cod (Gadus morhua) were consistent with the contrasting population dynamics of two prey species, herring (Clupea harengus) and sprat (Sprattus sprattus): sprat abundance increased nearly threefold following a sharp decline in the cod population (a strong interaction), whereas herring abundance failed to increase (a weak interaction). We found striking differences in the functional response of cod on alternative prey, and these were consistent with the observed patterns in interaction strengths. Cod predation was the dominant source of mortality for age-1 and age-2 sprat but was only important for age-1 herring. Moreover, the magnitude of predation mortality on age-1 and age-2 sprat was highly sensitive to cod biomass, whereas predation mortality on herring was only moderately sensitive to cod biomass. These analyses suggest the possibility that food webs are comprised of linkages that vary with respect to the magnitude and importance of predation mortality and how this mortality varies with changes in predator abundance.


2021 ◽  
pp. 55-64
Author(s):  
John P. DeLong

In this chapter, I extend the standard functional response model to communities in which predators are foraging on more than one kind of prey. This is an essential component of real foraging scenarios that is not yet widely represented in the functional response literature but is crucial to understanding food webs generally. Here I develop the multi-species functional response and describe it using my particular perspective on how we understand these functions in general. I review the importance of considering multiple prey types and the limited empirical work estimating multi-species functional responses.


2021 ◽  
pp. 133-144
Author(s):  
John P. DeLong

Being recognized for more than 70 years and estimated thousands of times, with numerous analyses of compilations, it would seem there is a lot we should know about functional responses. Indeed, we know some of the ways in which functional responses vary, how foraging mechanisms combine to determine, to at least some extent, functional response parameters, and how functional responses influence community interactions from biocontrol impacts to invasive predators to food webs. I suggest, however, that there remains a considerable amount that we do not know, in particular for field-based functional responses, multi-species functional responses, individual variation, behavioral mechanisms, and the impact and evolution of underlying traits. I suggest these areas should be high priorities for future work on functional responses.


2019 ◽  
Vol 613 ◽  
pp. 49-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
VN de Jonge ◽  
U Schückel ◽  
D Baird
Keyword(s):  

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