ArticleNature communications2022
Consistent predator-prey biomass scaling in complex food webs.
Article in Nature communications, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
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- Commercial fishing amplifies impacts of increasing temperature on predator-prey interactions in marine ecosystems.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Biomass distribution of sympatric mammals in a European temperate forest.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Trophic levels of decomposers in the treatment of herbicide wastewater: a mediator of positive interactions among microbial community assembly, function and stability.Frontiers in microbiology · 2025Article
- Biomass competition connects individual and community scaling patterns.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Protorhabditis nematodes and pathogen-antagonistic bacteria interactively promote plant health.Microbiome · 2024Article
- Are Wild Prey Sufficient for the Top Predators in the Lowland Protected Areas of Nepal?Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Gelatinous filter feeders increase ecosystem efficiency.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Does periphyton turn less palatable under grazing pressure?ISME communications · 2024Article
- Imbalanced intracellular nutrient stoichiometries drive the regional structural variation of microeukaryotic communities in paddy fields.ISME communications · 2024Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The ratio of predator-to-prey biomass is a key element of trophic structure that is typically investigated from a food chain perspective, ignoring channels of energy transfer (e.g. omnivory) that may govern community structure. Here, we address this shortcoming by characterising the biomass structure of 141 freshwater, marine and terrestrial food webs, spanning a broad gradient in community biomass. We test whether sub-linear scaling between predator and prey biomass (a potential signal of density-dependent processes) emerges within ecosystem types and across levels of biological organisation. We find a consistent, sub-linear scaling pattern whereby predator biomass scales with the total biomass of their prey with a near ¾-power exponent within food webs - i.e. more prey biomass supports proportionally less predator biomass. Across food webs, a similar sub-linear scaling pattern emerges between total predator biomass and the combined biomass of all prey within a food web. These general patterns in trophic structure are compatible with a systematic form of density dependence that holds among complex feeding interactions across levels of organization, irrespective of ecosystem type.
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Registered trials
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