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What is a top-down regulation?

What is a top-down regulation?

This is called top-down regulation. Terborgh and his co-authors in Continental Conservation write, “’Top-down’ means that species occupying the highest trophic level (top carnivores) exert a controlling influence on species at the next lower level (their prey) and so forth down the trophic ladder.”

What is an example of top-down regulation?

A top-down controlled system focuses on how top consumers influence lower trophic levels. This could be thought of as a predator driven system. One of the classic examples of a top-down trophic cascade is the sea otter story from the Pacific coast. Key players in the food chain are sea otters, sea urchins and kelp.

What is a top-down interaction?

In the top-down control, the populations of the organisms lower trophic levels (bottom of the pyramid) are controlled by the organisms at the top. This approach is also called the predator-controlled food web of an ecosystem. The “top-down” or “bottom-up” refers to the ecological pyramid describing trophic levels.

What is top-down control of the food web?

A top-down cascade is a trophic cascade where the top consumer/predator controls the primary consumer population. Top-down food web stability depends on competition and predation in the higher trophic levels. Invasive species can also alter this cascade by removing or becoming a top predator.

What is Bottomup thinking?

Bottom-up thinking is said to take place through a process of taking in details and building up from there. This thinking style involves formulating connections with other examples to make sense of what is occurring, and then capturing the commonalities between the connections into something concrete.

Is rainfall a bottom-up factor?

Rainfall impacts plants, which these animals depend on for food, and is thus a bottom- up factor. The number of lions or parasites may also affect a population’s size, but they are top-down factors instead.

What is the difference between a top-down effect and a bottom-up effect?

The bottom-up effect means that a lower trophic level in the biological network affects the community structure of higher trophic levels by means of resource restriction [12]. The top-down effect refers to a higher trophic level influences the community structure of a lower trophic level through predation [10].

What is a top-down Cascade Labster?

A top-down cascade describes a disturbance at the level of tertiary or quarternary predators. A Bottom-up cascade describes a disturbance of the primary producers. An example of which could be an increase or decrease in apex predators due to a change in available resources.

What is bottom down effect?

Are trophic cascades real?

Trophic cascades are powerful indirect interactions that can control entire ecosystems. Trophic cascades occur when predators limit the density and/or behavior of their prey and thereby enhance survival of the next lower trophic level.

What is Bottomup learning?

Bottom-up learning refers to learning implicit knowledge first and then learning explicit knowledge on that basis (i.e., through “extracting” implicit knowledge).

What is bottom attention?

Attention can be categorized into two distinct functions: bottom-up attention, referring to attentional guidance purely by externally driven factors to stimuli that are salient because of their inherent properties relative to the background; and top-down attention, referring to internal guidance of attention based on …

How does the top down control work in an ecosystem?

For a stable and diversified ecosystem, the system itself needs to come up with ways to control the populations of all its species and make sure it remains in the most suitable range. One of the mechanisms that nature has devised is the top-down control. The “top-down”, refers to the ecological pyramid.

How does the removal of the top predator affect the food web?

The removal of the top predator can alter the food web dynamics. In this case, the primary consumers would overpopulate and exploit the primary producers. Eventually there would not be enough primary producers to sustain the consumer population. Top-down food web stability depends on competition and predation in the higher trophic levels.

How are bottom up and top down forces related in marine ecosystems?

Our results suggest that in marine ecosystems, pathways for bottom-up and top-down forces are not necessarily mutually exclusive and together can lead to the emergence of complex patterns of control.

How are trophic cascades related to the food web?

Trophic cascades are powerful indirect interactions that can control entire ecosystems, occurring when predators in a food web suppress the abundance or alter the behavior of their prey, thereby releasing the next lower trophic level from predation (or herbivory if the intermediate trophic level is a herbivore).