Letter
Nature 437, 880-883 (6 October 2005) | doi:10.1038/nature03962; Received 14 June 2005; Accepted 30 June 2005
Trophic cascades across ecosystems
Tiffany M. Knight1,2, Michael W. McCoy1, Jonathan M. Chase2, Krista A. McCoy1 & Robert D. Holt1
- Department of Zoology, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida 32611, USA
- Department of Biology, Washington University, St Louis, Missouri 63130, USA
Correspondence to: Tiffany M. Knight1,2 Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to T.M.K. (Email: tknight@biology2.wustl.edu).
Predation can be intense, creating strong direct and indirect effects throughout food webs1, 2, 3, 4. In addition, ecologists increasingly recognize that fluxes of organisms across ecosystem boundaries can have major consequences for community dynamics5, 6. Species with complex life histories often shift habitats during their life cycles7 and provide potent conduits coupling ecosystems5, 6. Thus, local interactions that affect predator abundance in one ecosystem (for example a larval habitat) may have reverberating effects in another (for example an adult habitat). Here we show that fish indirectly facilitate terrestrial plant reproduction through cascading trophic interactions across ecosystem boundaries. Fish reduce larval dragonfly abundances in ponds, leading to fewer adult dragonflies nearby. Adult dragonflies consume insect pollinators and alter their foraging behaviour. As a result, plants near ponds with fish receive more pollinator visits and are less pollen limited than plants near fish-free ponds. Our results confirm that strong species interactions can reverberate across ecosystems, and emphasize the importance of landscape-level processes in driving local species interactions.
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