Body mass–based links between predator and prey are fundamental to the architecture of food webs. These links determine who eats whom across trophic levels and strongly influence the population abundance, flow of energy, and stability properties of natural communities. Body mass links scale up to create predator-prey mass relationships across species, but the origin of these relationships is unclear. Here I show that predator-prey mass relationships are consistent with the idea that body mass evolves to maximize a dependable supply of resource uptake. I used a global database of ~2,100 predator-prey links and a mechanistic optimization model to correctly predict the slope of the predator-prey mass scaling relationships across species generally and for nine taxonomic subsets. The model also predicted cross-group variation in the heights of the body mass relationships, providing an integrated explanation for mass relationships and their variation across taxa. The results suggest that natural selection on body mass at the local scale is detectable in ecological organization at the macro scale.

中文翻译：

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在食物网的大规模体系结构中检测人体质量进化的特征。

食肉动物与猎物之间基于体重的联系对于食物网的结构至关重要。这些联系确定了谁在营养级别上吃了谁，并极大地影响了人口的丰度，能量流和自然社区的稳定性。身体质量的联系不断扩大，以在各个物种之间建立食肉动物与猎物的质量关系，但是这些关系的起源尚不清楚。在这里，我证明了食肉动物与猎物之间的质量关系与这样的观点是一致的，即体重会不断发展，以最大限度地增加可靠的资源摄取。我使用了约2,100个捕食者-猎物链接的全局数据库和一个机械优化模型，可以正确预测整个物种和9个分类学子集上的捕食者-猎物质量比例关系的斜率。该模型还预测了体重关系高度的跨组变化，从而为质量关系及其在整个分类单元中的变化提供了完整的解释。结果表明，在宏观尺度上的生态组织中可以检测到局部尺度上的自然体重选择。