Nov. 22, 2013 — That smaller islands will typically sustain fewer species than large ones is a widespread pattern in nature. Now a team of researchers shows that smaller area will mean not only fewer species, but also shorter food chains. This implies that plant and animal communities on small islands may work differently from those on large ones.
Top predators the first to go
Working across a set of 20 islands off the Finnish coast, a group of Finnish scientists found that a disproportionate number of small islands were lacking the highest levels of the food chain. The results are freshly online in the journal Ecography.
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