Editing Food web (section)

== History of food webs ==
[[Image:EltonFW.jpg|thumb|upright=2|Victor Summerhayes and [[Charles Sutherland Elton|Charles Elton]]'s 1923 food web of Bear Island (''Arrows point to an organism being consumed by another organism'').]]

Food webs serve as a framework to help ecologists organize the complex network of interactions among species observed in nature and around the world. One of the earliest descriptions of a food chain was described by a [[medieval]] [[Afro-Arab]] scholar named [[Al-Jahiz]]: "All animals, in short, cannot exist without food, neither can the hunting animal escape being hunted in his turn."<ref name="Egerton02">{{cite journal | last1=Egerton | first1=F. N. | title=A history of the ecological sciences, part 6: Arabic language science: Origins and zoological writings. | journal=Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America | volume=83 | issue=2 | pages=142–146 | url=http://www.esapubs.org/bulletin/current/history_list/history_part6.pdf}}</ref>{{rp|143}} The earliest graphical depiction of a food web was by [[Lorenzo Camerano]] in 1880, followed independently by those of Pierce and colleagues in 1912 and [[Victor Ernest Shelford|Victor Shelford]] in 1913.<ref>{{cite journal | last1 = Egerton | first1 = FN | year = 2007 | title = Understanding food chains and food webs, 1700-1970 | doi =10.1890/0012-9623(2007)88[50:UFCAFW]2.0.CO;2 | journal = Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America | volume = 88 | pages = 50–69 }}</ref><ref>Shelford, V. (1913). [https://archive.org/details/animalcommuniti00shel <!-- quote=victor shelford animal communities. -->  "Animal Communities in Temperate America as Illustrated in the Chicago Region"]. University of Chicago Press.</ref> Two food webs about [[herring]] were produced by Victor Summerhayes and [[Charles Sutherland Elton|Charles Elton]]<ref>{{cite journal | last1 = Summerhayes | first1 = VS | last2 = Elton | first2 = CS | year = 1923 | title = Contributions to the Ecology of Spitsbergen and Bear Island | journal = Journal of Ecology | volume = 11 | issue = 2| pages = 214–286 | doi=10.2307/2255864| jstor = 2255864 }}</ref> and [[Alister Hardy]]<ref>{{cite journal | last1 = Hardy | first1 = AC | year = 1924 | title = The herring in relation to its animate environment. Part 1. The food and feeding habits of the herring with special reference to the east coast of England | journal = Fisheries Investigation London Series II | volume = 7 | issue = 3| pages = 1–53 }}</ref> in 1923 and 1924. [[Charles Sutherland Elton|Charles Elton]] subsequently pioneered the concept of food cycles, food chains, and food size in his classical 1927 book "Animal Ecology"; Elton's 'food cycle' was replaced by 'food web' in a subsequent ecological text.<ref name="Elton27">{{cite book|last=Elton|first=C. S.|title=Animal Ecology|publisher=Sidgwick and Jackson|place=London, UK.|year=1927|isbn=978-0-226-20639-4}}</ref> After Charles Elton's use of food webs in his 1927 synthesis,<ref>Elton CS (1927) Animal Ecology. Republished 2001. University of Chicago Press.</ref> they became a central concept in the field of [[ecology]]. Elton<ref name="Elton27" /> organized species into [[Functional group (ecology)|functional groups]], which formed the basis for the [[trophic level|trophic system of classification]] in [[Raymond Lindeman]]'s classic and landmark paper in 1942 on trophic dynamics.<ref name="Lindeman42" /><ref name="Paine80" /><ref name="Allee32">{{cite book|last=Allee|first=W. C.|title= Animal life and social growth|url=https://archive.org/details/animallifesocial00allerich|publisher=The Williams & Wilkins Company and Associates|place=Baltimore|year=1932}}</ref> The notion of a food web has a historical foothold in the writings of [[Charles Darwin]] and his terminology, including an "entangled bank", "web of life", "web of complex relations", and in reference to the decomposition actions of earthworms he talked about "the continued movement of the particles of earth". Even earlier, in 1768 John Bruckner described nature as "one continued web of life".<ref name="Pimm91" /><ref name="Stauffer60">{{cite journal | last1=Stauffer | first1=R. C. | title=Ecology in the long manuscript version of Darwin's "Origin of Species" and Linnaeus' "Oeconomy of Nature" | journal=[[Proc. Am. Philos. Soc.]] | volume=104 | issue=2 | year=1960 | pages=235–241 | jstor=985662}}</ref><ref name="Darwin81">{{cite book |last1=Darwin | first1=C. R. | title= The formation of vegetable mould, through the action of worms, with observations on their habits | year=1881 |location=London | publisher=John Murray | url=http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?viewtype=text&itemID=F1357&pageseq=1}}</ref><ref name="Worster94">{{cite book | last1=Worster | first1=D. | title=Nature's economy: A history of ecological ideas | publisher=Cambridge University Press | edition=2nd | year=1994 | page=423 | isbn=978-0-521-46834-3 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=2Ng-5B5H2wcC&q=food+web+history+ecology+linnaeus+economy+of+nature&pg=PR9}}</ref>

Interest in food webs increased after Robert Paine's experimental and descriptive study of intertidal shores<ref>{{cite journal | last1 = Paine | first1 = RT | year = 1966 | title = Food web complexity and species diversity | journal = The American Naturalist | volume = 100 | issue = 910| pages = 65–75 | doi=10.1086/282400| s2cid = 85265656 }}</ref> suggesting that food web complexity was key to maintaining species diversity and ecological stability. Many [[theoretical ecologist]]s, including [[Robert May, Baron May of Oxford|Sir Robert May]]<ref>May RM (1973) Stability and Complexity in Model Ecosystems. [[Princeton University Press]].</ref> and Stuart Pimm,<ref>Pimm SL (1982) Food Webs, [[Chapman & Hall]].</ref> were prompted by this discovery and others to examine the mathematical properties of food webs.