Thread by @DBarriosONeill

Our paper in Ecology Letters gathers all good data we have on feeding interactions in that most expansive of places: the seabed. Millions of species—185 data points. This is a problem. We need to talk about why studying interactions is awesome & necessary. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/el…

First, I should clarify that by good data I mean data that gives us some idea of how an organism searches for, captures and handles food. In ecology, it is not (always) enough to just know who eats whom, but rather how strong an interaction is.

The strength of interactions between species matter. Because reasons. Like for example how entire ecosystems will respond to things like climate change. Which is kinda important.

And things like whether non-native species we accidentally-on-purpose introduce are going to dine on the locals to extinction.
besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…
@DickJaimie @EcoInvasions

Roughly speaking, the bigger and warmer you are, the more you need to eat. But when we look at all the good data we have for feeding interactions across all biomes (less than 1000 data points 😱😱) it’s super messy.
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.10…

Which is to say, this data is super interesting. What mechanisms explain all these differences? Obviously a lot more than just size and temperature.

Like, for example, the quite amazing finding that interactions are generally stronger in 3D than 2D. That such a fundamental pattern could go unrecognised until 2012 illustrates perfectly that we need to get serious about measuring interactions. nature.com/articles/natur…

There’s so much more to talk about here. A whole world of patterns waiting to be discovered, but we can’t get there without generating lots more data. A few examples of some of those patterns here:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/el…
nature.com/articles/s4155…
besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/13…

Part of the problem is “model-systemitus”—as @PelagicLabQUB pointed out to me the other day. We’ve loads of data on water fleas and stickleback and almost nothing on everything else. Stickleback are a good model for, err, stickleback. Not lugworms or urchins or clams.

(Says me, who has loads of papers that use stickleback and water fleas.)

Another is, perhaps, that we’ve not yet decided that gathering good data on interactions is something ecologists should be doing systematically, as a matter of routine.

I feel like this last statement might seem controversial, because ecologists have always studied interactions. But consider that taxonomy was born with Aristotle, and yet there’s ~2000 years between him and the father of modern systematic taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus.

Another problem is that interactions aren’t something you can hold, and pickle, and put in a jar on a museum shelf. Daniel Janzen nails their importance:

I could wibble on for at least a dozen more tweets, but I'll park it here.

Ecology matters.

Interactions between species matter.

Ecologists have a lot of necessary and cool work to be doing filling in those knowledge gaps | gaping knowledge chasms.

FIN.