The complexity of interactions among various species creates intricate ecosystems, which scientists strive to unfurl up to today completely. There are many challenges associated with that topic, and in the past decades, ecologists focused their research on the importance of biodiversity. Nowadays, the studies of biodiversity allow scientists to predict ecosystem functions through the knowledge of early-warning signs (Jeliazkov et al., 2020). This essay will assess what conclusions scientists make from knowing the positive and negative aspects of relationships among interacting populations.
Every species in an ecosystem has their own niché, which is defined by their role in relations with species of above and below said species level. The inclusion of evolutionary information into the studies helped researchers to understand the niché modelling process and provided a strong basis for further works on biodiversity (Smith et al., 2019). By pinpointing the exact level that a particular species holds in an ecosystem, humans can improve its stability or rapidly act on mitigation of potential disaster.
By applying this information, ecologists were able to structurize an entire process that constitutes an emergence of an ecosystem. Piovia-Scott et al. (2017) provide a description of a trophic cascade as the paradigm that states that “consumer limitation of lower trophic levels plays an important role in determining community composition and ecosystem function” (p. 282). This paradigm was first discovered by Charles Darwin, however, it was out of focus for many years, until R.T. Paine introduced the term “a trophic cascade” to the scientific community (Ripple et al., 2016). With this knowledge, ecologists are now able to precisely trace an entire history of past and modern food webs and predict any changes in biodiversity from climate shifts, human activities, and other influences.
The structure of communities of various species has been affected by human activities with no regards to the lives of animals for a prolonged time. However, by thoroughly examining current ecosystems, ecologists began to call for attention to previously undiscovered and subtle links that could be broken by careless exploitation of nature. For example, a disruption in the food chain of Arctic whales could be caused by setting transportation routes close to the continent, as exhaustion byproducts will damage algae on which local krill feeds (Piovia-Scott et al., 2017). Such discoveries can not only prevent potential damage but also help in reversing past harmful effects on the ecosystem.
Outside of human influence, these cascades are affected by species’ activities and introduction of same species-level competitors. Shifts in biodiversity can happen when a niché level species become too few, or too abundant. However, these systems balance themselves out until every trophic level is equally represented in local biodiversity. For example, research by Start and Gilbert (2017) shows that “the high prey mortality associated with active predators translated into shifts in community composition towards predator resistant prey” (p. 372). On the other hand, the abundance of prey attracts a higher number of predatory species, to a point when the system starts an opposite balancing swing (Start & Gilbert, 2017). This process stimulates evolutionary selection, as more resilient prey and more cunning predators tend to keep their place in the ecosystem.
In conclusion, relationships of various species are a topic that has been highly debated in recent times, and it uncovered many previously unnoticed aspects of biodiversity. Species interact in a sophisticated manner and are more intricately linked than scientists thought before. Ecologists continue to examine trophic cascades to gain more insight into nature’s inner mechanisms. These efforts will help civilization to preserve the planet and its beauty.
References
Jeliazkov, A., Mijatovic, D., Chantepie, S., Andrew, N., Arlettaz, R., Barbaro, L., Barsoum, N., Bartonova, A., Belskaya, E., Bonada, N., Brind’Amour, A., Carvalho, R., Castro, H., Chmura, D., Choler, P., Chong-Seng, K., Cleary, D., Cormont, A., Cornwell, W., … & Chase, J. (2020). A global database for metacommunity ecology, integrating species, traits, environment and space. Scientific Data 7(6).
Piovia-Scott, J., Yang, L., & Wright, A. (2017). Temporal variation in trophic cascades. Annual Review in Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, 48, 281–300.
Ripple, W., Estes, J., Schmitz, O., Constant, V., Kaylor, M., Lenz, A., Motley, J., Self, K., Taylor, D., & Wolf, C. (2016). What is a trophic ccascade? Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 31(11), 842–849.
Smith, A., Gosdoe, W., Rodríguez-Sánchez, F., Wang, H., & Warren, D. (2019). Niche estimation above and below the species level. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 34(3), 260-273.
Start, D., & Gilbert, B. (2017). Predator personality structures prey communities and trophic cascades. Ecology Letters, 20, 366–374.