EXPERIMENTAL ECOLOGY OF FOOD WEBS: COMPLEX SYSTEMS IN TEMPORARY PONDS: The Robert H. MacArthur Award Lecture Presented 31 July 1995Snowbird, Utah by

Abstract

A food web graphically represents the paths of nutrients and energy through the living components of an ecosystem and the context in which individuals exploit their prey and avoid their enemies. Temporary ponds are excellent arenas for the study of food webs because they are discrete communities that can be mimicked in containers that approach the realism of natural habitats. Artificial ponds permit repeatable initial conditions and sufficient replication of independent experimental units in complex experiments to test hypotheses about the control of structure and function in natural communities. I used a combination of observations of natural ponds, ‘‘experimental natural history’’ of artificial ponds in my study area, and controlled experiments in an array of 144 replicate ponds to develop, then test, hypotheses about how the structures of food webs are regulated.