Concomitant predation on parasites is highly variable but constrains the ways in which parasites contribute to food web structure.

ABSTRACT: Previous analyses of empirical food webs (the networks of who eats whom in a community) have revealed that parasites exert a strong influence over observed food web structure and alter many network properties such as connectance and degree distributions. It remains unclear, however, whether these community-level effects are fully explained by differences in the ways that parasites and free-living species interact within a food web. To rigorously quantify the interrelationship between food web structure, the types of species in a web and the distinct types of feeding links between them, we introduce a shared methodology to quantify the structural roles of both species and feeding links. Roles are quantified based on the frequencies with which a species (or link) appears in different food we

SUBMITTER: Cirtwill AR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4964941 | biostudies-literature | 2015 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature