Exploring Food Webs

Abstract

When one draw a picture of who-eat-whom for an ecosystem, this results in a food web. It is simply a network but is of smaller size than those from other disciplines. Although small in size, a food web can also have complexities that bewilder ecologists for many years. Here, I present a simple model for food webs that may shed lights on how an ecosystem is assembled. Although the performance of the model is comparable to the well-established niche food web model, but it still fails to capture the some characteristic of the real data. To this end, I propose a bootstrapping method that might help to infer the food web characteristics without understanding the mechanism of its assembling process. Furthermore I propose a theory for the observed complexity in real food webs. ?