Allometry in an eco-evolutionary network model

An eco-evolutionary food web model is modified to incorporate a body-size trait, enabling a framework for non- uniform mortality and ecological efficiency between species. Evolved communities feature increased connectance, with according benefits to community robustness, and persistent top predators but reduced omnivory and food chain lengths. Body-size maintains a strong positive correlation to trophic level, but does not correlate to an individual species' contribution to network stability. A spatially-explicit extension of the model assembles large metacommunities with distinct distributions of body-size amongst local food webs.