On Feeding on More Than One Trophic Level
Pimm, Stuart L., and John H. Lawton
Nature 275, no. 5680 (1978): 542-544
https://doi.org/10.1038/275542a0
“In trying to understand the structure of ecological communities, ecologists usually pay particular attention to the interactions between pairs, or small groups of species. Questions about the ‘shape’ of the food webs within which these species are embedded are much more rarely asked. For example, what happens when a population feeds at more than one trophic level (omnivory)? In some real food webs there seem to be no omnivores (Fig. 1a); in others omnivores are common (Fig. 1c). In this note we attach the problem of omnivory using simple, linear Lotka–Volterra models of food webs, and show that certain patterns are much more likely to persist on an evolutionary time scale than others. We then compare the model predictions with real food webs. ”
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