The most popular Lifestyle on earth / ¿Sabes cuál es el estilo de vida más popular en la tierra?

Has its icon. Genetics has the double helix of DNA. Particle physics has the spiraling tracks of electrons and protons. And if you had to sum up modern ecology in a single picture, it would be the dense mesh of arrows and circles that represents the food web. The food web’s structure helps ecologists unravel how ecosystems function.

In the animal kingdom, there are many connections between species that determine their fundamental role in the ecosystem and their position in the food web. In each ecosystem there is a large amount of creatures that can not be seen that can control the ecosystem over even the main predators. Parasites are abundant in terms of biomass that they outnumber predators, sometimes up to 20 to 1. The scientists did not pay attention to them, since in the popular trophic networks they had to determine who ate who in a random ecosystem, which was not possible with the parasites since their study turned out to be much more complex, they thought they had no effect significant in the food web. But by including them in the same, they realized that the trophic network took some considerable complexity.

Some are mortal, they can control populations of predators and prey alike, others do not kill their host, but live inside them, feeding on their food and diverting their energy for its use. These can maintain a healthy ecosystem, controlling how the main predators coexist with their prey. And when the ecosystem is threatened, they are the first to feel the effects, which would lead one to believe that they could be an early warning system for threatened ecosystems. Besides, many need more than one kind of guest throughout their life, in other words, they move through the food web. To say that the parasites did not matter to the food webs seems absurd. Over time, this argument was falling and their study has highlighted the importance of parasites in trophic networks, have proven to be important at all trophic levels and indispensable for them. In fact, a precursor researcher of the first studies said: "The moment you enter an ecosystem and do not see any parasites at all, worry."