CONSTANT CONNECTANCE IN COMMUNITY FOOD WEBS

The constant connectance hypothesis states that among community food webs, trophic links increase approximately as the square of the number of functionally distinct or "trophic" species. This hypothesis is corroborated by the following analysis of 175 community food webs (2-93 trophic species), which shows that the exponent of the link-species relationship is approximately two. This scaling contradicts the widely accepted link-species scaling law, which asserts that finks increase linearly with the number of species and that the link-species exponent is one. My results combined with related findings regarding food chain lengths indicate that large food webs have many more links and much longer food chains than previously suggested.