Category: Ecology

Summary: Testing whether ecological shocks are amplified differently depending on which trophic layer is perturbed and how coherent the food web is.

A food web can respond very differently to the same shock depending on where in the trophic hierarchy the disturbance begins. This experiment asks whether intermediate trophic incoherence makes mid-layer perturbations especially amplifiable, compared with shocks applied at basal or apex layers.

The proposed mechanism is that moderate shortcut structure creates enough feedback loops to recycle disturbances through the network core without fully washing them out across all layers. The model therefore compares perturbation responses across trophic levels while sweeping the amount of trophic coherence in the interaction structure.

That turns food-web architecture into a filtering problem. Rather than measuring only overall stability, the experiment asks which layers act as the most effective launch points for localized shocks under different structural regimes.

Method: Repeated simulations of trophically structured ecological networks, sweeping trophic coherence and perturbing different trophic layers to compare response amplification.

What is measured: Perturbation amplification by trophic layer, dependence on trophic coherence or incoherence, shock recycling through the network core, and relative response of basal, middle, and apex layers.