Threshold Extinction in Food Webs

Abstract: Understanding how an extinction event affects ecosystem is fundamental to biodiversity conservation. For this reason, food web response to species loss has been investigated in several ways in the last years. Several studies focused on secondary extinction due to biodiversity loss in a bottom-up perspective using in-silico extinction experiments in which a single species is removed at each step and the number of secondary extinctions is recorded. In these binary simulations a species goes secondarily extinct if it loses all its resource species, that is, when the energy intake is zero. This pure topological statement represents the best case scenario. In fact a consumer species could go extinct losing a certain fraction of the energy intake and the response of quantitative food webs to node loss could be very different with respect to simple binary predictions. The goal of this paper is to analyze how patterns of secondary extinctions change when higher species sensitivity are included in the analyses. In particular, we explored how food web secondary extinction, triggered by the removal of most connected nodes, varies as a function of the energy intake threshold assumed as the minimum needed for species persistence. As we will show, a very low increase of energy intake threshold stimulates a disproportionate growth of secondary extinction.