Trophic species

Trophic species have identical prey and a shared set of predators in the food web.

This means that members of a trophic species share many of the same kinds of ecological functions.

[1][2] The idea of trophic species was first devised by Frederic Briand and Joel Cohen in 1984 when investigating scaling laws applying to food webs.

When assigning groups in a trophic manner, relationships are linear in scale, which allowed the same authors to predict the proportion of different trophic links in food webs.

[4] Furthermore grouping similar species according to feeding habit rather than genetics results in a ratio of predator to prey that is generally 1:1 in food webs.

Species are grouped trophically on the left, however distinctions such as herbivore and predator are merely the simplest definitions.