近日，美国莱斯大学Evan C. Fricke等研究人员发现晚更新世以来陆生哺乳动物食物网的崩溃。2022年8月25日，国际知名学术期刊《科学》发表了这一成果。

研究人员利用已灭绝和现存哺乳动物的特征、地理范围、观察到的捕食者-猎物相互作用和深度学习模型，确定了过去约13万年来全球陆地哺乳动物食物网的变化。在人类的到来和扩张之后，食物网的复杂性经历了区域性的急剧下降，失去了食物网的联系。研究人员估计，破坏造成了全球食物网链接的53%减少。尽管物种灭绝解释了这一影响的大部分，但现存物种的范围损失也使食物网退化到了类似的程度，这突出了通过现存物种恢复食物网的潜力。

据悉，食物网影响生态系统的多样性和功能。当代的退化降低了食物网的复杂性，但由于捕食者-猎物相互作用的古记录稀少，过去的退化造成的简化很难重建。

附：英文原文

Title: Collapse of terrestrial mammal food webs since the Late Pleistocene

Author: Evan C. Fricke, Chia Hsieh, Owen Middleton, Daniel Gorczynski, Caroline D. Cappello, Oscar Sanisidro, John Rowan, Jens-Christian Svenning, Lydia Beaudrot

Issue&Volume: 2022-08-26

Abstract: Food webs influence ecosystem diversity and functioning. Contemporary defaunation has reduced food web complexity, but simplification caused by past defaunation is difficult to reconstruct given the sparse paleorecord of predator-prey interactions. We identified changes to terrestrial mammal food webs globally over the past ~130,000 years using extinct and extant mammal traits, geographic ranges, observed predator-prey interactions, and deep learning models. Food webs underwent steep regional declines in complexity through loss of food web links after the arrival and expansion of human populations. We estimate that defaunation has caused a 53% decline in food web links globally. Although extinctions explain much of this effect, range losses for extant species degraded food webs to a similar extent, highlighting the potential for food web restoration via extant species recovery.

DOI: abn4012

Source: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abn4012