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Science 7 July 1989:
Vol. 245. no. 4913, pp. 48 - 52
DOI: 10.1126/science.2740915
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Articles

Science, Vol 245, Issue 4913, 48-52
Copyright © 1989 by American Association for the Advancement of Science

articles

Scale invariance in food web properties

G Sugihara, K Schoenly, and A Trombla

Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093.

The robustness of five common food web properties is examined by varying the resolution of the data through aggregation of trophic groupings. A surprising constancy in each of these properties is revealed as webs are collapsed down to approximately half their original size. This analysis of 60 invertebrate-dominated community food webs confirms the existence of all but one of these properties in such webs and addresses a common concern held by critics of food web theory that observed food web properties may be sensitive to trophic aggregation. The food web statistics (chain length; predator/prey ratio; fraction of top, intermediate, and bottom species; and rigid circuits) are scaling in the sense that they remain roughly invariant over a wide range of data resolution. As such, within present standards of reporting food web data, these statistics may be used to compare systems whose trophic data are resolved differently within a factor of 2.


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