Sugihara and his colleagues found that these common representations have far more information in them than was previously recognized. The pair of species in the terminal twigs have a relationship to each other--they are splitting up the resource that is the total of the insects feeding on the tree.

The PNAS paper finds that abundances of pairs of species in terminal twigs behave in a very special way. "Just like two pieces of rock that once belonged together," Pimm says. "Take a rock and split it into two pieces. On average, the bigger piece will be three-quarters of the rock, the smaller a quarter of the rock. If you take any two rocks, there won't be such a pattern. The sizes of those rocks are unrelated."

The paper shows that this applies to all the branches in the tree: such as the total abundance of all seed-eating birds versus the total abundance of insect-eating birds.

What can you do with this insight? Plenty, Sugihara argues. "For one thing, a species represented by a 'twig' should be much less common than a species that is represented by a 'branch,'" says Sugihara. "A bird that feeds on small insects from leaves on the top of a tree should be rarer than one that can feed on all sizes of insects anywhere. That prediction holds up."

It can apply to human niches too: The more specialized a profession, the fewer customers the business will have. A general store usually caters to more customers than one that sells just one kind of product.

The insight also suggests a pattern to species abundances across many species. It's the exact pattern one would get from breaking a rock once, then picking one of the pieces and splitting it, then picking another piece and splitting it, and so on. That sequential splitting generates a characteristic pattern in the sizes of rocks--and the abundance of species. It's also exactly the one we observe in nature.

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Contact: Mario Aguilera
scrippsnews@ucsd.edu
858-534-3624
University of California - San Diego
14-Apr-2003