Category: Ecology

Summary: Locating the detrital-recycling strength at which the leading reactive mode in a coherent food web shifts from the grazing chain onto a detritus-decomposer bridge.

Detrital recycling can reorganize how ecological perturbations move through a food web, not just whether the web is stable on paper. This experiment asks when strengthening a detrital feedback loop causes the dominant reactive mode to stop sitting on the grazing chain and instead relocalize onto a decomposer-detritus-basal bridge.

The model constructs dense symmetric operators for trophically coherent food webs with explicit detrital structure, then uses iterative deepening and repeated eigensolves to bisect the recycling threshold as system size increases. Along the way it records how much of the leading mode lies on the loop, the grazing chain, the detritus compartment, and decomposers.

That focus makes the result a structural transition map for transient ecological amplification. It identifies the point where recycling stops being a background process and becomes the main route through which perturbations are concentrated.

Method: Dense symmetric eigensolves with iterative deepening and bisection on detrital-loop strength omega across N=64 to 2048.

What is measured: Critical loop-strength threshold, loop mass, grazing mass, detritus mass, decomposer mass, participation ratio, leading eigenvalue, and bracket width.