Publication Date:
2011-01-29
Description:
The effect of environmental change on ecosystems is mediated by species interactions. Environmental change may remove or add species and shift life-history events, altering which species interact at a given time. However, environmental change may also reconfigure multispecies interactions when both species composition and phenology remain intact. In a Caribbean island system, a major manifestation of environmental change is seaweed deposition, which has been linked to eutrophication, overfishing, and hurricanes. Here, we show in a whole-island field experiment that without seaweed two predators--lizards and ants--had a substantially greater-than-additive effect on herbivory. When seaweed was added to mimic deposition by hurricanes, no interactive predator effect occurred. Thus environmental change can substantially restructure food-web interactions, complicating efforts to predict anthropogenic changes in ecosystem processes.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Piovia-Scott, Jonah -- Spiller, David A -- Schoener, Thomas W -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2011 Jan 28;331(6016):461-3. doi: 10.1126/science.1200282.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Section of Evolution and Ecology and Center for Population Biology, One Shields Avenue, University of California Davis, Davis, CA 95616-8755, USA. jpioviascott@ucdavis.edu〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21273487" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Animals
;
*Ants
;
*Arthropods
;
Bahamas
;
Ecosystem
;
Feeding Behavior
;
*Food Chain
;
Geography
;
*Lizards
;
*Plants
;
*Predatory Behavior
;
Seasons
;
*Seaweed
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
Permalink
