Trends in research on shallow water food webs

Making sense of the spider-web networks of interactions between species in food webs has been a major pre-occupation of ecologists over the last 60 years. This review describes the early attempts to reduce this complexity through the grouping of individual taxa into functional categories (such as trophic levels), through adopting the energy flow or systems approach as epitomised by the International Biological Programme, and most recently by the derivation of web statistics by food web theorists. The strengths and weaknesses of these approaches are discussed in relation to empirical field experiments for unravelling the processes responsible for organising communities and an assessment made of the representation of these approaches in the marine biological literature.