Wildlife's hidden networks

Science | Environment - Pete Wilton | 02 Nov 10. What links different pollinating insects in your garden or sea otters and kelp? In a recent paper in Royal Society B Becky Morris of Oxford University's Department of Zoology explored how species interactions create networks in which apparently unconnected organisms can affect one another. I asked Becky about how these networks work and what the possible implications are for how we attempt to conserve biodiversity around the world. OxSciBlog: How are species organised in networks? - Becky Morris: Species don't exist in isolation; they are each linked to one or more other species, with which they interact in a variety of different ways, for example as predators or pollinators. Think of them as being like web sites (the species) arranged on the World Wide Web (the network). For example, all the insects that pollinate flowers in your garden, along with the flowers that they pollinate, could be considered as a relatively discrete network (although they would also interact with species outside this network). OSB: Why is understanding such networks important? - BM: Because species are organised in networks, any perturbation to one species is likely to have a knock-on effect on many other species in the network, including those with which it interacts only indirectly.