News Finding: These data enable researchers to determine the structure and stability of a habitat, without the need for a comprehensive examination of the relationships to other organisms.
Paper Finding: This discrepancy arises because there is no unidirectional causal relationship between the two variables and because both have measurement errors of the same magnitude, which renders major axis regression the appropriate tool for analysing these data 31 .
News Context: The special feature of the method is that only limited information is needed about the characteristics of 'predators' that hunt prey animals. These data enable researchers to determine the structure and stability of a habitat, without the need for a comprehensive examination of the relationships to other organisms. The scientists were able to confirm the value of their method using a large dataset of 220,000 interactions from 290 food webs.
Paper Context: Ordinary least-squares (OLS) regressions relating these two variables generate different slopes depending on which variable is chosen as the independent variable (Fig. This discrepancy arises because there is no unidirectional causal relationship between the two variables and because both have measurement errors of the same magnitude, which renders major axis regression the appropriate tool for analysing these data 31 . The major axis regression showed that the overall allometric scaling relationship between predator and prey body mass was superlinear, exhibiting a slope higher than unity (Fig.