Food Webs Explained

Learning how reality works is fascinating. Man makes assumptions, does research, loses assumptions and moves on. This is what science is all about, something pretty cool I must say. In this case, the research centered on how food webs work, a topic becoming increasingly important given just much of the world man has "modified" during the past 50,000 years.

But what if we could pinpoint the most powerful players in a given food web, those "keystone" species without which the entire ecosystem would collapse? And what if we could predict how changes to an ecosystem would affect its various organisms based on data collected from another ecosystem half a world away?

Researchers from Northwestern University, with partners from New Zealand's University of Canterbury and the Spanish Research Council, say we can. Their research has revealed commonalities about species' roles in food webs that could hold the key to success in conversation efforts and preservation of ecological communities worldwide.

The paper, "Evolutionary Conservation of Species' Roles in Food Webs," was published March 23 in the journal Science.

By studying the roles played by species in 32 ecological communities, the researchers found a species' role, or importance, in its food web isn't dependent upon its geographic location or even which species are present. Instead, a species' importance depends upon the type of species it is and its evolutionary history.

Darwin would be proud. :)