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Trophic Uncertainty Vss Parsimony in Food Web Research
Trophic Uncertainty Vss Parsimony in Food Web Research
Trophic Uncertainty Vss Parsimony in Food Web Research
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FORUM FORUM is intended for new ideas or new ways of interpreting existing information. It
provides a chance for suggesting hypotheses and for challenging current thinking on
FORUM ecological issues. A lighter prose, designed to attract readers, will be permitted. Formal
research reports, albeit short, will not be accepted, and all contributions should be concise
FORUM with a relatively short list of references. A summary is not required.
Gut content analysis (GCA) is the most widely accepted method tions. This, combined with the fact that different non-
for generalising about a species' food habits. GCA is valuable if dissective methods have been employed by food web
the purposeof the study is to determinethe frequencyor strength
of interactions between species, or to establish new food links. researchers only in recent years (e.g. Havens et al.
However, determiningall food links through GCA is impossible 1996), seems to indicate that GCA has been held by
for large speciose webs. Furthermore,GCA may not reveal the many authorities to be the most reliable method.
true nature of linkage dynamics due to environmental and
physiological stochasticity. It is therefore parsimonious to as- Schoenly and Cohen (1991), for example, insist that
sume that linkages between species recordedin the literature will GCA is indispensable for establishing food linkages,
be found in all food webs, if the same prey and predator species and ought to be conducted afresh for every new de-
occur in those systems.
To reveal new linkages, fresh GCA is desirable, but impracticable
scription of a food web, in order to ascertain the
for large speciose webs containing many rare and endangered trophic links actually existing in the system during each
species, in which case it may be replaced by several non-dissective period of observation.
methods. High-resolution data for tropical webs could be gener-
ated through observations made by trained indigenous peoples.
Trophic indeterminateness
Precision of inferences regarding the structure of a food
Gut content analysis (GCA) is performed to find out web crucially depends on the resolution of data. To
what an animal has eaten, and the finding is subse- describe an entire web requires identifying all taxa in
quently generalized: what has been found in a speci- the system, which appears too ambitious to accomplish.
men's stomach would represent the diet items of the The checklist of species in a moderately sized commu-
species. This kind of inductive generalization is a pow- nity tends to lengthen with time and effort spent on
erful tool in biology. However, inferring from GCA identifying them (Cohen et al. 1993, Havens et al.
may not always reveal the true nature of interaction 1996). As a corollary, the diet spectrum of any one
dynamics (Stoner and Zimmerman 1988). For example, species is likely to increase indefinitely with efforts to
the variety and density of prey, access to the food discover them (Polis 1991). One might call this "trophic
items, predator hunger and gustatory preferences may indeterminateness", which seems to be corroborated by
affect the inferences drawn from the typological GCA. a growing body of evidence.
Not only are the trophic links always in a state of flux Polis (1991) derived his "species-effort curve" from
(Lane 1985), but the directionality of the links also his study of desert arthropods, and aquatic systems
varies according to developmental stages of organisms have also yielded similar results. For example, the
(Warren 1989, Deb 1995). Thus, the gut contents of water flea Daphnia, known to be purely herbivorous,
today's samples are likely to differ from those of an- were reported by Gilbert and coworkers (Burns and
other time; similar samples from different communities Gilbert 1986, Gilbert and MacIsaac 1989) to kill and
may also yield different GCA results, due to their consume small rotifers such as Keratella in the process
different species compositions and abundances, and of filtering algae. Calanoid copepods, known as pelagic
also perhaps due to different environmental influences. herbivores, are now reported also to eat small bra-
Considering these and other limitations of GCA, chionid rotifers (Warren and Lawton 1987). Until re-
many researchers have adopted several alternative cently, phagotrophic uptake of bacteria by phyto-
methods, but their explanations as to why GCA was flagellates (Tranvik et al. 1989) was also unknown.
not conducted (Stoner and Zimmerman 1988, Havens Aquatic micro-organisms await intensive studies to re-
1991, Polis 1991, Deb 1995) often appear to reveal that veal further details of feeding behaviour. Terrestrial
peer review of such works demanded those explana- examples include such common mammalian herbivores