BODY SIZES OF CONSUMERS AND THEIR RESOURCES

By U. Brose, Lara Cushing, Eric L Berlow, T. Jonsson, Carolin Banašek-Richter, Louis-Félix Bersier, J. Blanchard, Thomas Brey, Stephen R. Carpenter, Marie-France Cattin Blandenier and 20 more. 2005

129 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Trophic information—who eats whom—and species' body sizes are two of the most basic descriptions necessary to understand community structure as well as ecological and evolutionary dynamics. Consumer–resource body size ratios between predators and their prey, and parasitoids and their hosts, have recently gained increasing attention due to their important implications for species' interaction strengths and dynamical population stability. This data set documents body sizes of consumers and their resources. We gathered body size data for the food webs of Skipwith Pond, a parasitoid community of grass-feeding chalcid wasps in British grasslands; the pelagic community of the Benguela system, a source web based on broom in the United Kingdom; Broadstone Stream, UK; the Grand Caricaie marsh at Lake Neuchtel, Switzerland; Tuesday Lake, USA; alpine lakes in the Sierra Nevada of California; Mill Stream, UK; and the eastern Weddell Sea Shelf, Antarctica. Further consumer–resource body size data are included for planktonic predators, predatory nematodes, parasitoids, marine fish predators, freshwater invertebrates, Australian terrestrial consumers, and aphid parasitoids. Containing 16 807 records, this is the largest data set ever compiled for body sizes of consumers and their resources. In addition to body sizes, the data set includes information on consumer and resource taxonomy, the geographic location of the study, the habitat studied, the type of the feeding interaction (e.g., predacious, parasitic) and the metabolic categories of the species (e.g., invertebrate, ectotherm vertebrate). The present data set was gathered with the intent to stimulate research on effects of consumer–resource body size patterns on food-web structure, interaction-strength distributions, population dynamics, and community stability. The use of a common data set may facilitate cross-study comparisons and understanding of the relationships between different scientific approaches and models.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a3927c7f9202ee2e2753379148d42ee0c99aad60

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Citations in the corpus

Food‐web connectance and predator interference dampen the paradox of enrichment (2008, unknown): “…and Innes 1992) that was updated with new allometric coefficients (Ernest et al. 2003, Brown et al. 2004) and extended to multi-species systems (Brose et al. 2005b, 2006b), where Bi? riGiBi X j consumers xjyBjFji=eji (1a) Bi? xiBi X j resources xiyBiFij X j consumers xjyBjFji=eji (1b) describe…”
Inferring food web structure from predator–prey body size relationships (2013, methodology): “We illustrate the method with the food web data sets of Brose et al. (2005).”
Scaling up keystone effects from simple to complex ecological networks (2005, background): “This value coincides with the mean over 13 101 invertebrate consumer–resource body size ratios in a global empirical data base (Brose et al. 2005).”
Ecological Networks in a Changing Climate (2010, background): “…ecosystems (Arntz et al., 1994; Chown and Gaston, 2000; Clarke, 1983; Dayton, 1990; Gray, 2001; Hedgpeth, 1971) and the recently characterized food web of the eastern Weddell Sea shelf and slope region (Figure 9) contains 488 species and over 16,000 feeding links (Brose et al., 2005; Jacob, 2005).”