Imperial College London
Alternate

Samraat Pawar

Faculty of Natural Sciences, Department of Life Sciences (Silwood Park)

Professor of Theoretical Ecology
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 2213s.pawar CV

 
 
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Location

 

2.4KennedySilwood Park

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Ho:2019:10.1111/ele.13334,
author = {Ho, H-C and Tylianakis, JM and Zheng, JX and Pawar, S},
doi = {10.1111/ele.13334},
journal = {Ecology Letters},
pages = {1734--1745},
title = {Predation risk influences food-web structure by constraining species diet choice},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ele.13334},
volume = {22},
year = {2019}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - The foraging behaviour of species determines their diet and, therefore, also emergent food-web structure. Optimal foraging theory (OFT) has previously been applied to understand the emergence of food-web structure through a consumer-centric consideration of diet choice. However, the resource-centric viewpoint, where species adjust their behaviour to reduce the risk of predation, has not been considered. We develop a mechanistic model that merges metabolic theory with OFT to incorporate the effect of predation risk on diet choice to assemble food webs. This 'predation-risk-compromise' (PR) model better captures the nestedness and modularity of empirical food webs relative to the classical optimal foraging model. Specifically, compared with optimal foraging alone, risk-mitigated foraging leads to more-nested but less-modular webs by broadening the diet of consumers at intermediate trophic levels. Thus, predation risk significantly affects food-web structure by constraining species' ability to forage optimally, and needs to be considered in future work.
AU  - Ho,H-C
AU  - Tylianakis,JM
AU  - Zheng,JX
AU  - Pawar,S
DO  - 10.1111/ele.13334
EP  - 1745
PY  - 2019///
SN  - 1461-023X
SP  - 1734
TI  - Predation risk influences food-web structure by constraining species diet choice
T2  - Ecology Letters
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ele.13334
UR  - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31389145
UR  - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ele.13334
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/72991
VL  - 22
ER  -
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