Ecologists are taking a page, and its ranking, from Google.
A new algorithm inspired by the search engine works well for predicting which species losses will trigger the fastest collapse of a food web, says theoretical ecologist Stefano Allesina of the University of Chicago.
Food webs describe the pattern of what eats what in the neighborhood. If one kind of grass or bug, for example, disappears, creatures that fed on it would need to find something else for lunch. If they couldn’t, or if the alternative entrées went extinct too, then the loss could trigger a cascade of extinctions. Losing certain species can starve so many others that the whole food web unravels.
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[Theoretical ecologist Stefano] Allesina got the idea for treating food webs like the World Wide Web while he was at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, Calif., and chanced upon a description of Google’s page ranking system. “I said, ‘That looks familiar,’’’ he remembers. In essence, the system calculates a page’s importance, or value to searchers, depending on the importance of the pages that link to it. Through the magic of mathematics, it works. In a food web, species draw importance from the importance of the species that eat them.
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