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Body sizes of consumers and their resources
Citation
Brose, U and Cushing, L and Berlow, EL and Jonsson, T and Banasek-Richter, C and Bersier, L-F and Blanchard, JL and Brey, T and Carpenter, SR and Cattin Blandenier, M-F and Cohen, JE and Dawah, HA and Dell, T and Edwards, F and Harper-Smith, S and Jacob, U and Knapp, RA and Ledger, ME and Memmott, J and Mintenbeck, M and Pinnegar, JK and Rall, BC and Rayner, T and Ruess, L and Ulrich, W and Warren, P and Williams, RJ and Woodward, G and Yodzis, P and Martinez, ND, Body sizes of consumers and their resources, Ecology, 86, (9) pp. 2545. ISSN 0012-9658 (2005) [Refereed Article]
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Copyright Statement
Copyright 2005 by the Ecological Society of America
DOI: doi:10.1890/05-0379
Abstract
Trophic information—who eats whom—and species’ body sizes are two of
the most basic descriptions necessary to understand community structure as well as ecological
and evolutionary dynamics. Consumer–resource body size ratios between predators
and their prey, and parasitoids and their hosts, have recently gained increasing attention
due to their important implications for species’ interaction strengths and dynamical population
stability. This data set documents body sizes of consumers and their resources. We
gathered body size data for the food webs of Skipwith Pond, a parasitoid community of
grass-feeding chalcid wasps in British grasslands; the pelagic community of the Benguela
system, a source web based on broom in the United Kingdom; Broadstone Stream, UK;
the Grand Caricaie marsh at Lake Neuchatel, Switzerland; Tuesday Lake, USA; alpine lakes
in the Sierra Nevada of California; Mill Stream, UK; and the eastern Weddell Sea Shelf,
Antarctica. Further consumer–resource body size data are included for planktonic predators,
predatory nematodes, parasitoids, marine fish predators, freshwater invertebrates, Australian
terrestrial consumers, and aphid parasitoids. Containing 16 807 records, this is the largest
data set ever compiled for body sizes of consumers and their resources. In addition to body
sizes, the data set includes information on consumer and resource taxonomy, the geographic
location of the study, the habitat studied, the type of the feeding interaction (e.g., predacious,
parasitic) and the metabolic categories of the species (e.g., invertebrate, ectotherm vertebrate).
The present data set was gathered with the intent to stimulate research on effects
of consumer–resource body size patterns on food-web structure, interaction-strength distributions,
population dynamics, and community stability. The use of a common data set
may facilitate cross-study comparisons and understanding of the relationships between
different scientific approaches and models.
Item Details
| Item Type: | Refereed Article |
|---|---|
| Keywords: | predator-prey body size ratios |
| Research Division: | Biological Sciences |
| Research Group: | Ecology |
| Research Field: | Community ecology (excl. invasive species ecology) |
| Objective Division: | Expanding Knowledge |
| Objective Group: | Expanding knowledge |
| Objective Field: | Expanding knowledge in the biological sciences |
| UTAS Author: | Blanchard, JL (Dr Julia Blanchard) |
| ID Code: | 100510 |
| Year Published: | 2005 |
| Deposited By: | Sustainable Marine Research Collaboration |
| Deposited On: | 2015-05-18 |
| Last Modified: | 2015-09-07 |
| Downloads: | 274 View Download Statistics |
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