ArticleJournal of biosciences2025
Why does community ecology need chemistry? Because keystone molecules can govern food webs.
Article in Journal of biosciences, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
In an earlier editorial (Borges 2022), I had talked about the keystone concept formulated by Robert Paine. This important concept (Paine 1966) emphasised the idea that biodiversity is maintained by a top-down process in which the removal of a keystone predator would allow the unchecked proliferation of herbivores; during this process a dominant herbivore might outcompete another herbivore species, resulting in the removal of the lesser competitor from the community and a reduction in overall species richness (i.e., the number of species present). The keystone predator concept is well-established in community ecology. Are there keystone molecules whose presence can influence the diversity of communities? At an extreme, of course, one may say that oxygen is a most important molecule whose presence has fuelled the diversification of autotrophs such as diatoms and plants, and hence the flowering of life. A key feature of Paine's keystone concept is that the species must exert an impact that is disproportionate to its abundance (Power
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