MUST CONNECTANCE DECREASE WITH SPECIES RICHNESS - Texas A&M University (TAMU) Scholar

Examined food-web properties of tropical aquatic communities at 4 sites over the course of an annual cycle. Two sites are located in the W llanos in Portuguesa, Venezuela, 2 are in Parque Nacional Tortuguero in the Limon province of Costa Rica's Atlantic lowlands. By defining the universe of the food web in different ways, diet data taken over the course of a year could be used to produce several legitimate food webs from the same study site. Each system was divided into seasonal (wet, dry) and combined-annual food webs. The community occurring at a site was defined as either the "total' (all species except rare ones with a sample size of one or two) or "common community' (only the most common species contributing to 95% of the total number of individual fishes collected during the sampling period). Food webs were assembled as either the complete web or the top-predator sink web, the former defined by the assemblage of fishes collected at a site, and the latter defined as an assemblage consisting of the top predator, all of its prey, all of the preys' prey, and so on. Connectance was calculated using all observed trophic links or excluding all weak trophic links. -from Author

MUST CONNECTANCE DECREASE WITH SPECIES RICHNESS Academic Article