HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

There are a number of management procedures that can be implemented in zoos which would create a more complex environment for felids and encourage them to achieve a more complete behavioural repertoire. Enclosure substrates and furnishings and the techniques used for offering food to captive cats all influence their psychological well‐being. This paper discusses some of the common misconceptions about cats in captivity and presents information about beneficial changes that have already been made in some institutions.

Summary Predicting the number of interactions among species in a food web is an important task. These trophic interactions underlie many ecological and evolutionary processes, ranging from biomass fluxes, ecosystem stability, resilience to extinction, and resistance against novel species. We investigate and compare several ways to predict the number of interactions in food webs. We conclude that a simple beta-binomial model outperforms other models, with the added desirable property of respecting biological constraints. We show how this simple relationship gives rise to a predicted distribution of several quantities related to link number in food webs, including the scaling of network structure with space and the probability that a network will be stable.

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