Food web cohesion

Both dynamic and topologic approaches in food webs have shown how structure alters conditions for stability. However, while most studies concerning the structure of food webs have shown a nonrandom pattern, it still remains unclear how this structure is related to compartmentalization and to responses to perturbations. Here we build a bridge between connectance, food web structure, and compartmentalization by studying how links are distributed within and between subwebs. A k subweb is defined as a subset of species that are connected to at least k species from the same subset. We study the k subweb frequency distribution (i.e., the number of k subwebs in each food web). This distribution is highly skewed, decaying in all cases as a power law. The most dense subweb has the most interactions, despite containing a small number of species, and shows connectivity values independent of species richness. The removal of the most dense subweb implies,multiple fragmentation. Our results show a cohesive organization, that is, a high number of small subwebs highly connected among themselves through the most dense subweb. We discuss the implications of this organization in relation to different types of disturbances.