Construct · 1 fields · 3 citations

trophic cascade: a standalone construct

One name. One construct. A landmark on the map.

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trophiccascade1 CONSTRUCTTrophic cascadePAINE · FOOD-WEB CASCADE

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Ecology

Predator effects propagating down a food chain to producers

Robert T. Paine named the trophic cascade in his 1980 Tansley Lecture on food webs, building on his 1966 finding that removing a single predatory starfish reshaped a whole rocky-shore community, evidence that a top predator can control species far removed from it in the food chain. The construct describes an indirect effect that travels down the trophic levels of a food web, the layers of who eats whom, so that a change in the abundance or behaviour of a top predator alters its prey, which in turn alters the plants or algae the prey consume, producing an alternating pattern of increase and decrease across the levels. Stephen Carpenter, James Kitchell, and James Hodgson gave the idea its influential lake formulation in 1985, showing that fish at the top of a lake food web can regulate the amount of algae at the bottom, and coining the related phrase cascading trophic interactions. What makes the trophic cascade a landmark is its reach: it explains how the loss or return of a single high-level consumer can ripple through an entire community and change the abundance of organisms several links away, a mechanism documented in settings from kelp forests and coral reefs to grasslands and lakes.[1][2][3]

Unit
An indirect, top-down effect measured as change in the abundance or biomass of a lower trophic level following change at a higher one
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Demonstrated by predator removal or addition experiments, exclosures, and natural experiments, comparing abundance or biomass across trophic levels between treatments

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Nearby constructs

predation3 fields · 6 citationsjingle · one word, three constructskeystone1 fields · 1 citationsanchor · a standalone constructkeystone species1 fields · 3 citationsanchor · a standalone construct

References

  1. Paine, R. T. (1980). Food webs: Linkage, interaction strength and community infrastructure. The Journal of Animal Ecology, 49(3), 666–685. https://doi.org/10.2307/4220
  2. Paine, R. T. (1966). Food web complexity and species diversity. The American Naturalist, 100(910), 65–75. https://doi.org/10.1086/282400
  3. Carpenter, S. R., Kitchell, J. F., & Hodgson, J. R. (1985). Cascading trophic interactions and lake productivity. BioScience, 35(10), 634–639. https://doi.org/10.2307/1309989

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