Trophic species

Trophic species are a scientific grouping of organisms according to their shared trophic (feeding) positions in a food web or food chain. Trophic species have identical prey and a shared set of predators in the food web. This means that members of a trophic species share many of the same kinds of ecological functions.^[1][2] The idea of trophic species was first devised by Frederic Briand and Joel Cohen in 1984 when investigating scaling laws applying to food webs.^[3] The category may include species of plants, animals, a combination of plants and animals, and biological stages of an organism. When assigning groups in a trophic manner, relationships are linear in scale, which allowed the same authors to predict the proportion of different trophic links in food webs.^[4] Furthermore grouping similar species according to feeding habit rather than genetics results in a ratio of predator to prey that is generally 1:1 in food webs.^[5]

Species are grouped trophically on the left, however distinctions such as herbivore and predator are merely the simplest definitions.