Understanding Food Chains and Food Webs, 1700–1970

A primer on the history of food web ecology: Fundamental contributions of fourteen researchers

“…Observations regarding food chains are deeply rooted in human history (Morris, 2014) with the first depictions of community-wide feeding relationships published in the early 20 th century (Egerton, 2007). Yet, many people associate the dawn of food web ecology with Charles Elton who, at the age of 26, published the classic book Animal Ecology (Elton, 1927).…”

History of Ecological Sciences, Part 54: Succession, Community, and Continuum

“…Although food chains had existed in the natural history literature since the early 1700s (Egerton 2007), and Semper (1881:51-52) had discussed a hypothetical food web, Italian entomologist Lorenzo Camerano (1856-1917) diagramed two barely comprehensible food webs in 1880, which may never have influenced anyone else (Egerton 2007d(Egerton :53, 2014a. The earliest clear diagram of a food web is perhaps the one by USDA entomologists Dwight Pierce and colleagues in 1912 on the cotton boll weevil and its enemies (illustration reproduced in Allee 1949:53, Egerton 2014a:68), followed in 1913 by two by Shelford (1913:70, 167, reprinted in Egerton 2007d).…”

Evolutionary food web models: effects of an additional resource

“…Ecologists have long been interested in food webs, with the first study dating back to the eighteen century (see references in Egerton (2007)). Many of the food webs investigated contain multiple resources (energy inputs), such as seaweed, salt, nutrients, and detritus (Dunbar, 1953), or they include resources that can be divided into size classes, such as phytoplankton (Sommer et al, 2002;Downing et al, 2014).…”