Beyond body mass: how prey traits improve predictions of functional response parameters

Understanding the factors that determine the strength of predator-prey interactions is essential to understanding community structure and stability. Variation in the strength of predator-prey interactions often can be attributed to predator mass and prey mass, or abiotic factors like temperature. However, even when accounting for these factors, there remains a considerable amount of unexplained variation that may be attributed to other traits. We compiled functional response data from the literature to investigate how predator mass, prey mass, prey type (taxonomic identity), temperature, and prey defenses (hard vs soft integument) contributed to the variation found in the predator-prey interactions between freshwater cyclopoid copepods and their prey. Surprisingly, our results indicate that prey identity (taxonomic group) and defenses (hard vs soft integument) are more important for generating variation in interaction strengths than body mass and temperature. This suggests that allometric functions can only take us so far when attempting to better understand variation in individual predator prey interactions, and that we must evaluate how other traits influence interaction strengths. Identifying additional factors such as prey defenses may enable us to better predict potential changes in the structure and function of planktonic and other food webs by better accounting for the variation in the interactions between generalists and their many prey types.