This dataset contains curated body mass, biomass, and resource density information for consumers and resources in the Potter Cove food web, from Rodriguez & Saravia (2024). The dataset was processed from raw measurements, with units converted to kilograms (kg), and some special handling for detritus and sponge taxa where direct body mass or density values were not available or meaningful.
Format
A data frame with the following columns:
- consumer
Name of the consumer species.
- resource
Name of the resource species.
- c_bodymass
Body mass of the consumer (in kg).
- r_bodymass
Body mass of the resource (in kg). May be set to
1for detritus or sponges.- r_biomass
Biomass of the resource (in kg).
- r_density
Resource density (units depend on context). May be
1for some resources or-999to flag missing values.
Details
When resource density is unknown, the value -999 is used as a flag so that
downstream functions can infer density or body mass using allometric relationships
following Pawar et al. (2012).
Body mass and biomass were originally in grams and converted to kilograms.
Sponge taxa (e.g., Chalinidae, Dendrilla antarctica) resource body mass and density
were assigned to 1.
References
Rodriguez, I. D., & Saravia, L. A. (2024). Potter Cove’s Heavyweights: Estimation of Species’ Interaction Strength of an Antarctic Food Web. Ecology and Evolution, 14(11), e70389. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.70389
Pawar, S., Dell, A.I., & Savage, V.M. (2012). Dimensionality of consumer search space drives trophic interaction strengths. Nature, 486(7404), 485–489.