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A test for top‐down cascade in a detritus‐based food web by litter‐dwelling web spiders
Author(s) -
Miyashita Tadashi,
Niwa Shigeru
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
ecological research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.628
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1440-1703
pISSN - 0912-3814
DOI - 10.1007/s11284-006-0155-0
Subject(s) - food web , detritus , litter , ecosystem , spider , ecology , biomass (ecology) , plant litter , abundance (ecology) , environmental science , trophic cascade , biology , soil food web
A top‐down cascade in detritus‐based food webs has the potential to alter ecosystem functioning but its prevalence in terrestrial systems remains unclear. We manipulated the density of the dominant web spider Neriene brongersmai for 1.5 years to see whether the cascading effect would propagate down to the litter decomposition rate in the forest‐floor of a Japanese cedar forest. Decreasing spider abundance increased collembolan density, but it did not change the biomass of microorganisms or the litter decomposition rate. We propose possible explanations for the absence of a top‐down cascade and discuss the difficulty in generalizing the presence and absence of a cascading effect in soil ecosystems.