Because dogs didn't exist back then, more relevant analogies had to be used in that title. Why? Because analyses of Chengjiang and Burgess Shale food-web data suggest that most, but not all, aspects of the trophic structure of modern ecosystems were in place over a half-billion years ago.

The ecology of Cambrian communities was remarkably modern, say researchers behind the first study to reconstruct detailed food webs for ancient ecosystems. Their paper suggests that networks of feeding relationships among marine species that lived hundreds of millions of years ago are remarkably similar to those of today.

Food webs depict the feeding interactions among species within habitats--like food chains, only more complex and realistic. The discovery of strong and enduring regularities in how such webs are organized will help us understand the history and evolution of life, and could provide insights for modern ecology--such as how ecosystems will respond to biological extinctions and invasions.

Fishing activities can provoke volatile fluctuations in the populations they target, namely by altering the “age pyramid.” Lopping off the few large, older fish that make up the top of the pyramid leaves a broad base of faster-growing small younglings and the research team found that this rapidly growing and transitory base is dynamically unstable — a finding having profound implications for the ecosystem and the fishing industries built upon it.

Imagine a container of water with a 500-pound fish. With food, it grows a little bigger. Without food it gets a bit smaller. Imagine the same container with 500 one-pound fish. They eat, reproduce and the resulting thousands of fish boom, quickly outstripping the resources and the population crashes. These many smaller fish — with the same initial “biomass” as the larger fish — can’t average out the environmental fluctuations, and in fact amplify them through higher turnover rates that promote boom and bust cycles.

Fishing typically extracts the older, larger members of a targeted species and fishing regulations often impose minimum size limits to protect the smaller, younger fishes.

Succession is one of the first things that students learn about in ecology. Each intervening stage modifies the environment in such a way that lays the groundwork for the next stage, while making the environment less hospitable to its own offspring. Only the final stage is self-perpetuating and stable.

Frederic Clements, one of the pioneers of community ecology, saw ecological succession as an ontogenic process in which the community - a superorganism - developed into its final, mature form. The orderly progression from bare ground to mature forest is orderly, progressive…and very Victorian.

When Victorian science provides a picture of nature that is, in its very essence, Victorian, there’s good reason to re-think your models. And in the study of succession, people have done that. People working on succession tend to stress the role of chance, and see the system as cyclical - there is no stable “climax” community, there are no undisturbed forests. But old ideas die slowly. Textbooks still teach succession using a number of early studies which were based on the idea that you could substitute space for time, what ecologists call chronosequence studies.

In a paper published in the May issue of Ecology Letters, by Edward Johnson and Kiyoko Miyanishi¹ take a look at some of the classic succession studies, and came to the conclusion that “empirical evidence invalidates the chronosequence-based sequences inferred in these classic studies“. While this is not totally surprising, it's important to document.

When people think about the destruction and degradation of tropical forests, they tend to focus on rainforests. Tropical dry forests tend to get overlooked. They aren’t as striking - no cathedral-like understorey, no mind-boggling biodiversity. But more importantly, they often just aren’t there. Over much of their potential range they have simply been erased from the landscape. They may have covered as much as 42% of the land area in the tropics¹, but have been reduced to less than 27% of their former range in Mexico², and as little as 2% in Central America³ and New Caledonia⁴.

Despite this fact, tropical dry forests are often seen as being quite well-adapted to human disturbance. Being less species-rich than wetter forests, they tend to support fewer rare species, and may be less extinction-prone. In addition, dry forests are dominated by trees that sprout after being cut. This means that if you cut down a patch of dry forest, most of the stumps will re-sprout. This type of recovery is much quicker than you would get if the trees had to germinate from seeds - not only does it take much longer for seedlings to grow large (stump sprouts can draw on resources stored in the roots of the tree), but there’s likely to be a time lag as seeds disperse into the area from surviving trees (tropical forests tend to lack long-lived seedbanks).

There's no McAlgae drive-through, but coral have their own addiction to 'junk food' and, say researchers, we may be in the position of needing to halt global warming in order to keep that fast food coming. 200 million humans depend on it for their subsistence.

The symbiosis between coral, a primitive animal, and zooxanthellae, tiny one-celled plants, is not only powerful enough to build the largest living organism on the planet, the Great Barrier Reef, but also underpins the economies and living standards of many tropical nations and societies who harvest their food from the reefs or have developing tourism industries.

The productivity and biodiversity of an ecosystem is significantly affected by the rate at which organisms move between different parts of the ecosystem, according to new research. Ecologists and conservationists hope to use this knowledge to develop strategies to ensure that conservation areas are highly productive and rich in biodiversity.

The study in Nature(1) used a lab-based artificial ecosystem of communities of bacteria to examine what happens when the bacteria move around and evolve to live in different parts of the ecosystem over the course of hundreds of generations. The scientists measured the effect this dispersal of species has on the productivity and biodiversity of the ecosystem over all.

When exotic species invade new territory, they often present a major threat to the other plants and animals living there, that much is clear, but in addition to their destructive tendencies, invasive species can also have a surprisingly “creative” side.

Researchers writing in Current Biology say they have discovered that an invasive population of the freshwater snail Melanoides tuberculata, found on the island of Martinique, harbors a tremendous amount of genetic variation for key life-history traits, such as fecundity, juvenile size, and age at first reproduction. And that means they have a remarkably large potential for evolutionary change.

Ski tourism raises stress levels among capercaillie and could harm the birds’ fitness and ability to breed successfully, write ecologists in the Journal of Applied Ecology. They warn that forests should be kept free from tourism if they are inhabited by capercaillie - a species whose numbers are declining markedly across central Europe.

The study by ecologists from Switzerland, Germany and Austria used a new technique to assess the impact of ski tourism on capercaillie. Working in the Southern Black Forest in Germany, they collected the birds’ droppings before and after the start of the ski season, and analysed them for levels of the breakdown products of the stress hormone corticosterone. They found that levels of the breakdown products of the stress hormone were significantly higher in birds living in areas with moderate or high levels of ski tourism.

Scientists have discovered Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba), a shrimp-like crustacean thought to live only in the upper ocean, are living and feeding down to depths of 3000 metres in the waters around the Antarctic Peninsula. The discovery completely changes scientists’ understanding of the major food source for fish, squid, penguins, seals and whales.

Antarctic krill feed on phytoplankton and are in turn eaten by a wide range of animals including fish, penguins, seals and whales. Phytoplankon are the starting point for the marine food chain and use photosynthesis to extract carbon from carbon dioxide.

If you are reading this, chances are that you live in a city – one, perhaps, on its way to becoming a megacity with a population that exceeds 10 million or more. If not, you and most of the world’s population soon will be, according to global population demographics projections.

“When we think of global change, images of melting ice caps and pasture replacing tropic rainforest come to mind,” Arizona State University ecologist Nancy Grimm says. “What drives these changes? In fact, much of the current environmental impact originates in cities, and with demographic transition to city life the urban footprint is likely to continue to grow.”