Effects of Experimental Seaweed Deposition on Lizard and Ant Predation in an Island Food Web

• Autores: Jonah Piovia-Scott
• Localización: Science, ISSN 0036-8075, Vol. 331, Nº 6016, 2011, págs. 461-463
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The effect of environmental change on ecosystems is mediated by species interactions. Environmental change may remove or add species and shift life-history events, altering which species interact at a given time. However, environmental change may also reconfigure multispecies interactions when both species composition and phenology remain intact. In a Caribbean island system, a major manifestation of environmental change is seaweed deposition, which has been linked to eutrophication, overfishing, and hurricanes. Here, we show in a whole-island field experiment that without seaweed two predators—lizards and ants—had a substantially greater-than-additive effect on herbivory. When seaweed was added to mimic deposition by hurricanes, no interactive predator effect occurred. Thus environmental change can substantially restructure food-web interactions, complicating efforts to predict anthropogenic changes in ecosystem processes.