This repository contains code and data associated with “Prey body mass and richness underlie the persistence of a top predator.”
Guzman LM, Srivastava DS. 2019 Prey body mass and richness underlie the persistence of a top predator. Proc. R. Soc. B 286: 20190622. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2019.0622
We experimentally measured the handling time and attack rate of one species of damselfly predator and multiple prey species. We used these feeding links to parameterize a food web model that was based solely on the body size of the different species in the community. We found that predator persistence was maximized when the minimum prey size in the community was intermediate, but as prey diversity increased, the minimum body size could take a broader range of values. This last result occurs because of Jensen’s inequality: the average handling time for multiple prey of different sizes is higher than the handling time of the average sized prey.