Static and dynamic explanations for patterns in food webs.

Ten interesting patterns can be discerned in compendia of published food webs, and are not all easily dismissed as artefacts of poor data. A variety of theoretical explanations have been put forward to explain one, or more, of these patterns; for example, five reasons have been advanced for why food chains are short. Two bodies of theory each satisfactorily account for a majority (but not all) of the patterns, but draw on very different assumptions. One group of theoretical explanations is based on dynamic interactions between species, modelled by Lotka-Volterra equations. The other takes a static view of food web assembly, and assumes a trophic cascade, or hierarchy of feeding links, in which species body sizes appear to play a crucial role. On present evidence, it is not possible to distinguish between the relative contributions of either of these possibilities in the creation of structure in real food webs.