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Now that’s complex! This is a rendering of the metanetwork for the San Francisco Bay food web. The network consists of 163 nodes, each node being a guild. In total, they represent ~1,600 species of invertebrates and fish, as well as four nodes representing various types of autotrophic producers. There are 5,024 links or trophic interactions between the guilds. The dataset currently excludes birds and marine mammals. Those data are being incorporated even as I type! So, when faced with this level of complexity, how does one determine if the system is resilient, or vulnerable to the removal or addition of specific types of species, or can withstand the effects of climate change?
The figure was produced by one of my graduate students, Rachel Hertog, who has done a tremendous amount of work on this project, as well as the Dominican Republican paleocommunities. The data come almost entirely from the collections of the California Academy of Sciences, notably the Dept. of Invertebrate Zoology & Geology, and the Dept. of Ichthyology.
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This rendering has the primary producers and all of the links to them removed, so it’s only showing consumer guilds and the links between them!
I don’t know what it would look like if we put the primary producers back in. Complex indeed.
Does this just contain the marine component, or are insects, spiders, and the consumers there included as well (e.g. planthoppers on up?)
The full dataset now includes brackish water organisms, as well as sea birds. But we drew the line, arbitrarily, at non-marine consumers. Good question though, since it gets to how connected these communities are! An interesting project will be to eventually try to identify communal structures in very large food webs. In other words, begin with large sets of trophic interactions, and then look for the communities.
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