Revisiting Winemiller 1990

In a paper published in Ecological Monographs in 1990, Kirk Winemiller described and compared four aquatic food webs from Costa Rica and Venezuela, and related their properties to properties of the biotic communities and the physical environment. Winemiller's study was one of the first to put food web theory to test using well-sampled empirical food …

Revisiting Johnson 1993

In a paper published in Ecological Applications in 1993, Nancy Collins Johnson showed, experimentally, that fertilization of soil leads to the selection of Arbuscular Mycorrhizal (AM) fungi that are inferior mutualists. Johnson found that fertilization, both, alters the species composition of AM fungal communities and that big bluestem plants colonized with AM fungi and other …

Revisiting Wilcove 1985

In a paper published in Ecology in 1985, David Wilcove provided experimental evidence in support of the idea that nest predation could be the cause for the decline of migratory songbirds in small woodlots in North America. Using fresh quail eggs places in artificial nests, Wilcove showed that predation was higher in smaller than in …

Revisiting Whittaker et al. 2001

In a paper published in the Journal of Biogeography in 2001, Robert Whittaker, Katherine Willis and Richard Field attempted to develop a "general, hierarchical theory of species diversity" that overcame what they saw as weaknesses of diversity theory at the time: failures to distinguish different response variables and adequately account for geographical scale. Seventeen years …

Revisiting Kirkpatrick 1982

In a paper published in Evolution in 1982, Mark Kirkpatrick showed, theoretically, that strong female mating preference for a male trait that reduces viability is neither selected for or against, but the mating advantage it provides to the males it prefers can lead to maintenance of that male trait in the population. Thirty-four years after …

Revisiting Roughgarden 1972

In a paper published in The American Naturalist in 1972, Joan Roughgarden presented a model to predict the course of evolution in a population containing individuals of different types of ecological specialization and put it to test using field data on a species of Anolis lizard collected by Tom Schoener. Thirty-five years after the paper …

Revisiting Magurran and Henderson 2003

In a paper published in Nature in 2003, Anne Magurran and Peter Henderson used a long-term dataset on estuarine fish to throw light on a puzzling pattern - a greater number of rare species than predicted by theory in large community assemblages. Magurran and Henderson showed this paradox can be explained by separating the dataset …