News Finding: The prediction is even more precise if, in addition to body mass, additional features such as the mode of locomotion or the metabolic type are considered.
Paper Finding: On average, interactions between relatively large predator and prey species are characterized by higher body-mass ratios than interactions between smaller species.
News Context: With the help of the data they had collected, Brose and his team were able to predict precisely which animals play a key role within a food web. The prediction is even more precise if, in addition to body mass, additional features such as the mode of locomotion or the metabolic type are considered. The analysis showed that, depending on the nature of the habitat, different species of predator maintain the equilibrium of an ecosystem.
Paper Context: This suggests that the body-mass ratios between predators and their prey increase with the masses of prey and predators (that is, the distance between the regression line and the dashed diagonal indicating equally sized predator-prey pairs). On average, interactions between relatively large predator and prey species are characterized by higher body-mass ratios than interactions between smaller species. The Bayesian approach also allowed us to fit mixed-effects models to the data, particularly the random effects on the intercept of the different studies (database variable, link.citation; see Supplementary Table GATEWAy metadata).