Department of Biology, University of York, York Y01 5DD, UK.
Trends Ecol Evol. 1988 Sep;3(9):242-5. doi: 10.1016/0169-5347(88)90167-X.
Ten interesting patterns can be discerned in compendia of published food webs, and are not all easily dismissed as artefacts of poor data. A variety of theoretical explanations have been put forward to explain one, or more, of these patterns; for example, five reasons have been advanced for why food chains are short. Two bodies of theory each satisfactorily account for a majority (but not all) of the patterns, but draw on very different assumptions. One group of theoretical explanations is based on dynamic interactions between species, modelled by Lotka-Volterra equations. The other takes a static view of food web assembly, and assumes a trophic cascade, or hierarchy of feeding links, in which species body sizes appear to play a crucial role. On present evidence, it is not possible to distinguish between the relative contributions of either of these possibilities in the creation of structure in real food webs.
在已发表的食物网纲要中可以发现十个有趣的模式，它们并非都是数据不佳的人为假象。人们提出了各种理论解释来解释这些模式中的一个或多个；例如，提出了五个原因来解释为什么食物链很短。两种理论体系都能很好地解释大多数（但不是全部）模式，但它们所依据的假设却大不相同。一组理论解释基于物种之间的动态相互作用，通过洛特卡-沃尔泰拉方程来建模。另一种则从食物网组装的静态角度出发，假设存在营养级联或食物链层次，其中物种的体型似乎起着关键作用。根据目前的证据，无法区分这两种可能性在真实食物网结构形成中的相对贡献。
