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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 ...
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 ...
Among consumers, herbivores can mediate the impacts of trophic cascades by bridging the flow of energy from primary producers to predators in higher trophic levels. [27] Across ecosystems, there is a consistent association between herbivore growth and producer nutritional quality. [26]
Another example of a multitrophic interaction is a trophic cascade, in which predators help to increase plant growth and prevent overgrazing by suppressing herbivores. Links in a food-web illustrate direct trophic relations among species, but there are also indirect effects that can alter the abundance, distribution, or biomass in the trophic ...
The relationship between ecosystem complexity and stability is a major topic of interest in ecology.Use of ecological networks makes it possible to analyze the effects of the network properties described above on the stability of an ecosystem.
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.
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.
A general consensus is that trophic cascades tend to have a larger effect in aquatic ecosystems compared to terrestrial. However, overregulation in any of these communities has the potential to result in the degradation of the trophic cascade within the system, preventing growth across many species of all levels (2012).