Topic summary
Food webs
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Food web.
Complexity and stability
Food webs are also complex in the way that they change in scale, seasonally, and geographically. The components of food webs, including organisms and mineral nutrients, cross the thresholds of ecosystem boundaries. This has led to the concept or area of study known as cross-boundary subsidy. "This leads to anomalies, such as food web calculations determining that an ecosystem can support one half of a top carnivore, without specifying which end." Nonetheless, real differences in structure and function have been identified when comparing different kinds of ecological food webs, such as terrestrial vs. aquatic food webs.