Editor's Choice October

Our October issue is out! Editor’s choices are two remarkable papers focusing on species interactions.

The forum paper of Oriol-Cotterill and colleagues focuses on landscapes of fear from the perspective of terrestrial carnivores, downgraded to penultimate predators by humans. Humans impose an unprecedented  selection pressure to  all life on earth. By following a behavioural ecological approach , the authors review how changes in behaviour in response to humans affect mortality risks. This ‘human-caused mortality’ represents a distinct and very important cause of fear for large carnivores, particularly for terrestrial large carnivores who’s activities more and more overlap with those of humans. 

Atkins et al. present in the same issue results from a simple but realistic experiment in which herbivore (snail) densities and body size were manipulated to develop a predictive theory on its impact on producer (cordgrass) biomass. The results show that changes in interaction strength attributed to size or density are in fact due to changes in metabolic biomass. So rather than body size or density, per se, variation in interaction strengths can be explained by the metabolic biomass, regardless of how this is reached. Together with other work focusing in insect-plant interactions, this work emphasis the importance of metabolic biomass as a central character to understand the functioning and structure of natural communities.