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Trophic cascades are powerful indirect interactions that can control entire ecosystems, occurring when a trophic level in a food web is suppressed. For example, a top-down cascade will occur if predators are effective enough in predation to reduce the abundance, or alter the behavior of their prey, thereby releasing the next lower trophic level from predation (or herbivory if the intermediate ...
Trophic coherence: The tendency of species to specialise on particular trophic levels leads to food webs displaying a significant degree of order in their trophic structure, known as trophic coherence, [22] which in turn has important effects on properties such as stability and prevalence of cycles.
Raccoons (Procyon lotor) and skunks (Mephitis mephitis) are mesopredators.Here they share cat food in a suburban backyard.. The mesopredator release hypothesis is an ecological theory used to describe the interrelated population dynamics between apex predators and mesopredators within an ecosystem, such that a collapsing population of the former results in dramatically increased populations of ...
Gray wolf in YellowStone National Park. A clear example of humans ecosynthesiszing would be through the introduction of a species to cause a trophic cascade, which is the result of indirect effects between nonadjacent trophic levels in a food chain or food web, such as the top predator in a food chain and a plant. [4]
trophic cascade trophic level The position of an organism within a food chain: what it eats, and what eats it. tropics tropical rain forest A biome characterized by regular, heavy rainfall, a humidity of at least 80 percent, and great biodiversity. tundra A permanently frozen, treeless expanse between the ice cap and tree line of arctic regions.
Autochthonous resources are produced by plants or algae within the local ecosystem [4] Allochthonous resources, including aquatic-terrestrial subsidies, can subsidize predator populations and increase predator impacts on prey populations, sometimes initiating trophic cascades.
Ecological facilitation or probiosis describes species interactions that benefit at least one of the participants and cause harm to neither. [1] Facilitations can be categorized as mutualisms, in which both species benefit, or commensalisms, in which one species benefits and the other is unaffected.
This is a strong example of the importance of the maintenance of the trophic cascade and suggests that top-down control is the primary regulatory factor in this system. James Estes and John Palmisano did similar experiments with otters, sea urchins, and kelp, where otter presence increased kelp presence in a trophic cascade . [ 9 ]