Abstract
WHETHER the diversity of resources limits the diversity of consumers, and specifically, whether the number of kinds of prey limits the number of kinds of predators, has been of continuing interest in theoretical ecology and wildlife management1–3. Food webs from the ecological literature were collected in machine readable form to study this question empirically. We report here that in community food webs, the ratio of the number of kinds of prey to the number of kinds of predators seems to be constant, near 3/4. This invariance has not been noticed in earlier studies of individual cases.
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References
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Cohen, J. E. Food Webs and Niche Space, (Princeton University Press, Princeton, in the press).
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COHEN, J. Ratio of prey to predators in community food webs. Nature 270, 165–167 (1977). https://doi.org/10.1038/270165a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/270165a0
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