Figure 2

Two analyses of the same topological data from a host food web in the Meadowlands salt marshes of New Jersey by Anderson and Sukhdeo 2011 [[24]]. (a) A traditional food web diagram showing linkages among participants. This is a parsimonious arrangement of species, so even though it seems as though there are 8 trophic levels, there are really only 4, with the graphing program spacing them out a little for the sake of visualization. (b) A network clustering algorithm partitioned the food web into 15 distinct modules of highly interacting species independent of trophic position, and suggested that parasites preferentially colonized highly connected modules of tightly interacting species which experience fewer fluctuations in abundance relative to those in the periphery.