Conditions for Eltonian Pyramids in Lotka-Volterra Food Chains

Abstract

In ecological communities consumers (excluding parasites and parasitoids) are in general larger and less numerous than their resource. This results in a well-known observation known as 'Eltonian pyramids' or the ` pyramid of numbers', and metabolic arguments suggest that this pattern is independent of the number of trophic levels in a system. At the same time, Lotka-Volterra (LV) consumer-resource models are a frequently used tool to study many questions in community ecology, but their capacity to produce Eltonian pyramids has not been formally analysed. Here, I address this knowledge gap by investigating if and when LV food chain models give rise to Eltonian pyramids. I show that Eltonian pyramids are difficult to reproduce without density-dependent mortality in the consumers, unless biologically plausible relationships between mortality rate and interaction strength are taken into account.

Published in

Scientific Reports
2017, Volume: 7, article number: 10912Publisher: NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP

SLU Authors

• Jonsson, Tomas

  • Department of Ecology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    
  • University of Skövde

UKÄ Subject classification

Ecology


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-11204-1

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/94249