Energetic self-similarity in food webs

The question investigated is whether the global efficiency and organization of food webs is common among a variety of food webs.

Method

The method is a renormalization procedure inspired by a box-counting method of Song et al (2005). The food web networks are coarse-grained at various scales of energy, where the energy in-flux of the renormalized nodes (called boxes) is variable of interest. The method is intended to capture topology in relation to the distribution of energy throughout a network, where scaling suggests “energetic self-similarity”.

Results

Results show the number energetic boxes necessary to cover different food webs scales similarly with the energetic size of each box: Ecosystems may share common self-similar structures in the distribution of energy through the food webs and the partitioning of energy and resources among species. In addition, preliminary analyses of scaling exponents in food webs find a slope around -1/4.

References

Song, C., S. Havlin, and H. A. Makse. 2005. Self-similarity of complex networks. Nature 433:392-395.