Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science, Lowestoft, Suffolk NR33 0HT, United Kingdom.
Ecology. 2010 Jan;91(1):222-32. doi: 10.1890/08-2061.1.
Predator-prey body size relationships influence food chain length, trophic structure, transfer efficiency, interaction strength, and the bioaccumulation of contaminants. Improved quantification of these relationships and their response to the environment is needed to parameterize food web models and describe food web structure and function. A compiled data set comprising 29582 records of individual prey eaten at 21 locations by individual predators that spanned 10 orders of magnitude in mass and lived in marine environments ranging from the poles to the tropics was used to investigate the influence of predator size and environment on predator and prey size relationships. Linear mixed effects models demonstrated that predator-prey mass ratios (PPMR) increased with predator mass. The amount of the increase varied among locations and predator species and individuals but was not significantly influenced by temperature, latitude, depth, or primary production. Increases in PPMR with predator mass implied nonlinear relationships between log body mass and trophic level and reductions in transfer efficiency with increasing body size. The results suggest that very general rules determine dominant trends in PPMR in diverse marine ecosystems, leading to the ubiquity of size-based trophic structuring and the consistency of observed relationships between the relative abundance of individuals and their body size.
捕食者-猎物体型关系影响食物链长度、营养结构、能量传递效率、相互作用强度以及污染物的生物积累。需要更好地量化这些关系及其对环境的响应，以便为食物网模型提供参数，并描述食物网的结构和功能。本研究使用了一个包含 29582 条记录的综合数据集，这些记录记录了在 21 个地点被个体捕食者吃掉的个体猎物，捕食者的质量跨越了 10 个数量级，生活在从极地到热带的海洋环境中。本研究旨在调查捕食者大小和环境对捕食者和猎物大小关系的影响。线性混合效应模型表明，捕食者-猎物质量比（PPMR）随捕食者质量的增加而增加。这种增加的幅度在不同的地点和捕食者物种和个体之间有所不同，但不受温度、纬度、深度或初级生产力的显著影响。与捕食者质量相关的 PPMR 增加意味着对数体质量和营养水平之间存在非线性关系，并且随着体型的增加，能量传递效率降低。研究结果表明，非常普遍的规律决定了不同海洋生态系统中 PPMR 的主导趋势，从而导致基于大小的营养结构的普遍性，以及个体相对丰度与其体型之间观察到的关系的一致性。
