New food-web model

Dear Colleagues,

I am a bit worried that I was too sharp in the description of the
mailing list about the "signal-to-noise ratio".  It was not meant to
discourage your contributions.  

On the contrary, I really think that progress in our field is at least
partially limited by an imperfect flow of information and the
resulting differences in perspectives.  This is a pity, because
food-webs science could contribute a lot more to urgent questions
related to biodiversity, invasive species, and fisheries, and also
fundamental problems of macroecology, than it currently does.  The
field has a lot more to offer, and is certainly large enough to
provide a comfortable niche for all of us.

Please tell us about your latest results!

***

Hoping that you do not experience this contribution as "noise", I
would like to bring your attention to a manuscript of us on

      "The top-down mechanism for body mass -- abundance scaling"

(http://axel.rossberg.net/paper/Rossberg2007b.pdf), recently accepted
for Ecology.

The Appendix of the paper describes a new evolutionary food-web model
which is probably the most complex, but perhaps also the most
realistic available so far.  Copy-right issues pending, the code of
the model and a large set of model food webs will be available for
download at Ecological Archives.  But the code is also available
directly from me (under Linux, you should have no problems compiling
it).

One of the weirder aspects of the model is that attack rates can
evolve freely, without any physiological trade-off.  First, they
evolve to larger and larger values, as one would expect.  But then
they saturate at an intermediate value that allows a large number of
species to co-exist.  I have no idea how this works.

Your comments are welcome,

Axel Rossberg
---
Evolution and Ecology Program
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
Schlossplatz 1
A-2361 Laxenburg
AUSTRIA
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reprints http://axel.rossberg.net/paper
and more http://axel.rossberg.net