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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 ...
Secondary habitat formers are typically attached to, [3] [12] [13] [14] entangled around, [15] [16] or embedded within [17] [18] the primary habitat former. Habitat cascades are strongest when the secondary habitat former is more effective than the primary habitat former at allowing focal organisms to avoid stress and enemies, and find ...
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 ...
Facilitation cascades have far-reaching ecological impacts on the diversity and function of the ecosystem as the positive effects of a subset of organisms cascade through the community, as in trophic cascades. The effect size of facilitation cascades can rival or exceed that of trophic cascades, and the main distinction between the indirect ...
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.
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.
Trophic cascades can cause drastic changes in the energy flow within a food web. [31] For example, when a top or keystone predator consumes organisms below them in the food web, the density and behavior of the prey will change. This, in turn, affects the abundance of organisms consumed further down the chain, resulting in a cascade down the ...
An ecological cascade effect is a series of secondary extinctions that are triggered by the primary extinction of a key species in an ecosystem.Secondary extinctions are likely to occur when the threatened species are: dependent on a few specific food sources, mutualistic (dependent on the key species in some way), or forced to coexist with an invasive species that is introduced to the ecosystem.