Washington Post, Chelsea Harvey, September 3, 2015 “In nature, the relationship between predators and their prey seems like it should be simple: The more prey that’s available to be eaten, the more predators there should be to eat them. If a prey population doubles, for instance, we would logically expect its predators to double too. But a new study, published Thursday in the journal Science, turns this idea on its head with a strange discovery: There aren’t as many predators in the world as we expect there to be. And scientists aren’t sure why. By conducting an analysis of more than a thousand studies worldwide, researchers found a common theme in just about every ecosystem across the globe: Predators don’t increase in numbers at the same rate as their prey. In fact, the faster you add prey to an ecosystem, the slower predators’ numbers grow [emphasis added]..”

• “Systematic changes in biomass and production across trophic communities link fundamental aspects of ecosystem structure and function. The striking similarities that are observed across different kinds of systems imply a process that does not depend on system details. The regularity of many of these relations allows large-scale predictions and suggests high-level organization. This community-level growth pattern suggests a systematic form of density-dependent growth and is intriguing given the parallels it exhibits to growth scaling at the individual level, both of which independently follow near ¾ exponents. Although we can make ecosystem-level predictions from individual-level data, we have yet to fully understand this similarity, which may offer insight into growth processes in physiology and ecology across the tree of life.” Science 4 September 2015: Vol. 349 no. 6252 DOI: 10.1126/science.aac6284