Caribbean food web

This is a Data set of the Caribbean food web that was analyzed in Bascompte, Melián and Sala (2005), Interaction strength combinations and the overfishing of a marine food web. PNAS 102: 5443-5447.

The stability of ecological communities largely depends on the strength of interactions between predators and their prey. Here we show that these interaction strengths are structured nonrandomly in a large Caribbean marine food web. Specifically, the cooccurrence of strong interactions on two consecutive levels of food chains occurs less frequently than expected by chance. Even when they occur, these strongly interacting chains are accompanied by strong omnivory more often than expected by chance. By using a food web model, we show that these interaction strength combinations reduce the likelihood of trophic cascades after the overfishing of top predators.