FOOD WEB PATTERNS AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES

A food web is a map that describes which kinds of organisms in a community eat which other kinds. A web helps picture how a community is put together and how it works. Although webs were often initially reported in despair at ever understanding ecological complexity, recently discovered widespread patterns in the shapes of webs, and theoretical explanations for these patterns, indicate that webs are orderly and intelligible, and have some foreseeable consequences for the dynamics of communities.