Extinction Dynamics of Cascade Food Webs

Ecologists use a variety of synthetic food web networks (cascade, niche, generalized cascade, etc.) to predict key structural properties of complex food webs. These synthetic food webs are inherently unstable in the sense that incorporating dynamics, even deterministic dynamics, causes many species to go extinct. We consider the cascade food web with competitive Lotka-Volterra dynamics and investigate the effect of initial conditions, birth and death rates, species interaction rates, and predation efficiency on the extinction dynamics. We also derive analytical results for food chains, which are used to gain insight into the persistence of cascade food webs.