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"ORGANISMS EATING EACH OTHER are only one of many types of well documented and important interactions among species." Simply put, deeply unpacked. https://lnkd.in/da5D-GT View in LinkedIn

THE VAST MAJORITY OF LIVING ORGANISMS on planet earth eat photons from the sun as their primary energy source, any way that you wish to count them. By biomass. By noses. View in LinkedIn

BY NOSES, VIRUSES: TEN TO ONE. "The ocean contains many mysteries, but none so great as its viruses. Scientists estimate that there are 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 virus particles in all the world’s seas. They outnumber all cellular life forms by roughly a factor of 10." But, confoundingly, viruses are neither autotrophs nor heterotrophs. They do not "troph", only reproduce. https://lnkd.in/dKbvY75 View in LinkedIn

BY NOSES, BACTERIA: 4-6 x 10(30) cells. "The total amount of prokaryotic carbon is 60–100% of the estimated total carbon in plants, and inclusion of prokaryotic carbon in global models will almost double estimates of the amount of carbon stored in living organisms." Can be either heterotrophs or autotrophs. https://lnkd.in/dU7VJwv View in LinkedIn

2ND WHOPPING IGNORED CATEGORY. "Microbial and metazoan food webs are one. Believe it or not, this integrated approach is rare. Prokaryotic global biomass is at least 60% that of plants. Perhaps much more." And we only know a few percent of the species of bacteria, viruses and fungi. https://lnkd.in/dFC_Kpj View in LinkedIn

1ST WHOPPING IGNORED CATEGORY. "Parasitism is the most common animal lifestyle, yet food webs rarely include parasites." https://lnkd.in/dvemNYR View in LinkedIn

BIOMASS allocation of living things on this planet is a funny way to describe a cartoon of planet earth. But if I told you that my zoo inhabitants were 4,000,000 kgs of species A, 1,500,000 kgs of species B, and 8,000 of species C, you would really be none the wiser. This is the Sumo wrestler argument. Better to say I had 13 great apes, 3 ruminants, and 100 smaller monkeys. Counting noses seems to make more sense. View in LinkedIn

PROCESS OPTIMIZATION. "Evolutionarily, this is like the difference between adapting the parameters of a phenotype directly (e.g. the traits of a phenotype) vs adapting the parameters of a developmental process that produces fit phenotypes (this is a distinction which is lost when we assume a one-to-one mapping between genotype and phenotype)." http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11692-015-9358-z View in LinkedIn

THE WORLD IS GREEN PROPOSITION, Hairston, Smith, and Slobodkin (1960). "The green biomass (in mature terrestrial communities) exists because predators kept herbivores in check." https://lnkd.in/d6T6CmR View in LinkedIn

OPTIMIZING THE PROCESS NOT OUTPUT. "Note that in a learning system the object of this incremental improvement process is different from a conventional optimisation process. Whereas a simple processes of optimisation (or incremental improvement) is usually applied to a solution or output directly, a learning process optimises a model of good solutions or outputs or an indirect representation of solutions." http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11692-015-9358-z View in LinkedIn