Small world patterns in food webs.

By J. M. Montoya, Ricardo Sol. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 2000

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The analysis of some species-rich, well-defined food webs shows that they display the so-called small world behavior shared by a number of disparate complex systems. The three systems analysed (Ythan estuary web, Silwood web and the Little Rock lake web) have different levels of taxonomic resolution, but all of them involve high clustering and short path lengths (near two degrees of separation) between species. Additionally, the distribution of connections P(k) which is skewed in all the webs analysed shows long tails indicative of power-law scaling. These features suggest that communities might be self-organized in a non-random fashion that might have important consequences in their resistance to perturbations (such as species removal). The consequences for ecological theory are outlined.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/861f14d2f19415accef04f22aac73acb9a793ea2

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Citations in the corpus

Spread of epidemic disease on networks. (2002, background): “Social networks [6, 7, 8, 9], technological networks [10, 11, 12, 13], and biological networks [14, 15, 16, 17, 18] have all been examined and modeled in some detail.”
Characterization of topological keystone species: Local, global and “meso-scale” centralities in food webs (2007, background): “On the other hand, some attempts have been made to account for all indirect effects in a food web by studying some global properties of these networks, such as their ‘‘smallworldness’’, or ‘‘scale-freeness’’ (Camacho et al., 2002; Montoya and Solé, 2002; Williams et al., 2002; Dunne et al., 2002b).”
A Resilient, Low-Frequency, Small-World Human Brain Functional Network with Highly Connected Association Cortical Hubs (2006, background): “It has been demonstrated that the neuronal network of Caenorhabditis elegans has small-world topology at a microscopic anatomical scale (Watts and Strogatz, 1998).”
Invariant properties in coevolutionary networks of plant-animal interactions (2002, background): “…of well resolved plant–animal interaction networks, including 29 plant–pollinator and 24 plant–frugivore systems (Table 1, Appendix; for details see Jordano 1987 and unpubl. data; Olesen & Jordano 2002), adding to the scarce data on community food webs (Dunne et al. 2002a,b; Montoya & Solé 2002).”
The Structure of Ecological Networks Across Levels of Organization (2020, background): “Short pathways indeed characterize pollination networks (Olesen et al. 2006), host-pathogen networks (Fodor 2011), food webs (Montoya & Solé 2002,Williams et al. 2002), and phytoplankton communities (Carey et al. 2017).”
QUANTITATIVE PATTERNS IN THE STRUCTURE OF MODEL AND EMPIRICAL FOOD WEBS (2004, result): “Therefore, there is a characteristic scale for the linkage density, i.e. food webs donot have a scale-free structure, in contrast to erroneous reports inrecent studies of food-web fragility (Solé and Montoya, 2001; Montoya and Solé, 2002).”
Complex networks: small-world, scale-free and beyond (2003, neutral): “Math. co-authorship [19] 70975 0.59 9.50 2.5 Food web [ 20 , 21] 154 0.15 3.40 1.13”
Dispersal connectivity and reserve selection for marine conservation (2011, background): “The average minimum path ength L is the average number of edges in the shortest path LMin(i, j) etween all pairs V(i, j) in a graph averaged over n(n − 1)/2 vertices Montoya and Sole, 2002).”
The “New” Science of Networks (2004, background): “…Vendruscolo et al. 2002, Wagner 2001, Wuchty 2002), biological neural networks (Morita et al. 2001, Sheﬁ et al. 2002), food webs (Dunne et al. 2002, Montoya & Sole 2002), transportation networks (Sen networks of boards of directors (Davis et al. 2003) and scientists (Newman 2001), the Internet…”