Exposing the structure of an Arctic food web

Ecology and Evolution

Helena K. Wirta²  Eero J. Vesterinen¹  Peter A. Hambäck⁴  Elisabeth Weingartner⁴  Claus Rasmussen⁶  Jeroen Reneerkens³  Niels M. Schmidt⁷  Olivier Gilg⁵ 

[1] Department of Biology, University of Turku, Turku, Finland;Department of Agricultural Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland;Conservation Ecology Group, Groningen Institute for Evolutionary Life Sciences, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands;Department of Ecology, Environment and Plant Sciences, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden;Laboratoire Biogéosciences, UMR CNRS 6282, Université de Bourgogne, Dijon, France;Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark;Arctic Research Centre, Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, Roskilde, Denmark

关键词: Calidris;    DNA barcoding;    generalism;    Greenland;    Hymenoptera;    molecular diet analysis;    Pardosa;    Plectrophenax;    specialism;    Xysticus;   

DOI  :  10.1002/ece3.1647

来源: Wiley

【 摘 要 】

Abstract

How food webs are structured has major implications for their stability and dynamics. While poorly studied to date, arctic food webs are commonly assumed to be simple in structure, with few links per species. If this is the case, then different parts of the web may be weakly connected to each other, with populations and species united by only a low number of links. We provide the first highly resolved description of trophic link structure for a large part of a high-arctic food web. For this purpose, we apply a combination of recent techniques to describing the links between three predator guilds (insectivorous birds, spiders, and lepidopteran parasitoids) and their two dominant prey orders (Diptera and Lepidoptera). The resultant web shows a dense link structure and no compartmentalization or modularity across the three predator guilds. Thus, both individual predators and predator guilds tap heavily into the prey community of each other, offering versatile scope for indirect interactions across different parts of the web. The current description of a first but single arctic web may serve as a benchmark toward which to gauge future webs resolved by similar techniques. Targeting an unusual breadth of predator guilds, and relying on techniques with a high resolution, it suggests that species in this web are closely connected. Thus, our findings call for similar explorations of link structure across multiple guilds in both arctic and other webs. From an applied perspective, our description of an arctic web suggests new avenues for understanding how arctic food webs are built and function and of how they respond to current climate change. It suggests that to comprehend the community-level consequences of rapid arctic warming, we should turn from analyses of populations, population pairs, and isolated predator–prey interactions to considering the full set of interacting species.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 The Authors. Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.