- Researchers in Wisconsin have introduced largemouth bass into a lake to artificially "flip" its food web
- All over the world, food web "flipping" is occurring constantly
- The reasons that these food webs change so dramatically is that they are put under a lot of human-caused stresses
- When an ecosystem's food web changes in such a dramatic manner, the ecosystem can fail
- Using mathematical models, ecologists are now determining what makes an ecosystem remain stable, and what makes it fall apart
- The mathematical models attempt to answer the question: "Why are ecological communities the way they are?"
- Most diagrams of food webs are drastically simplified, because real food webs usually involve dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of species
- Mathematical models have many changing variables, so scientists run them on computers
- Ecologists have revealed that there are many weak links in a food web, rather than a couple strong ones
- Weak links in a food web are comprised of interactions between species that only take place occasionally
- Mathematical models can also reveal the weak point in a food web, which can be used to prevent unintended collapse from occurring
- Mathematical models and real-life incidents have revealed that huge impacts in food webs are typically caused by changing predators
- Many unintentional cases of ecosystem collapse were caused in part by failure to account for interactions between other species in food webs
- In these cases, only the organism in demand was put in a mathematical model
- Some scientists believe that preventing food web "flipping" in the first place is more effective than trying to restore already-flipped food webs
- Using mathematical models, ecologists are trying to determine a set of common patterns that serve as early-warning signals for ecological collapse
- The search for these early-warning signals is still ongoing
Reflection: Using mathematical models to simulate a complex food web seem promising. If a computer is used thousands of possible scenarios can be modeled.If the outcome of environmental decisions can be accurately determined using this method, then it may become easier to avoid unintended consequences. But this begs the question of, are they accurate? The article mentioned many cases where the exclusion of a species from these models led to wrong predictions. How can one ever be certain that all the species in a food web are accounted for in the model? There may be some undiscovered species that are left out.