Food Webs: From the Lindeman Paradigm to a Taxonomic General Theory of Ecology

Abstract

Food web studies hold a special place within the discipline of ecology. Fretwell (1987) has made this explicit by the rhetorical title of his paper “Food chain dynamics: The central theory of ecology?” A central, or, general theory of ecology would require that the key components of the science could be derived solely from the study of food chains or food webs. The concept of ecosystem is of particular importance to a general theory of ecology and it is shown how the ecosystem can be defined from the food web. The statement (McNaughton et al., 1989) that “Ecosystems are structurally organized as food webs” identifies the approach taken here, which is quite distinct from the Tansley-Lindeman concept that ecosystems are physical-chemical-biological systems. A general theory of ecology should also exhibit a clear relationship to the theory of evolution and to the domains of other sciences. The spatial scale derived from foraging areas within a food web is used to define intrinsic spatial scale in ecology and from this to define the domain of ecology as distinct from other sciences. The requirement that any general theory of ecology should be consistent with the theory of evolution is met both in the definition of the ecosystem as a reproductive lineage (Hull, 1974) and by the rejection of trophic level categories in favor of taxonomic categories from which to derive the properties of food webs (Cousins, 1985, 1988).