Scientists visit Peter Lake on July 2008 and dropped 12 largemouth bass into the water.
They left behind sensors that could measure water clarity every five minutes, 24 hours a day.
The group scientist repeated the same trip two more times in 2009.
In the summer of 2010, Peter Lake changed dramatically, the lake abounded in fathead minnows, pumpkinseeds and other small fish.
The tiny animals that the small fish once devoured were now free to flourish.
Two years later the ecosystem remains in its altered state, Peter Lake’s food web had been flipped, shifting from a longstanding arrangement to a new one.
In recent decades food webs across the world have also been flipping, often unexpectedly, on a far greater scale.
Jellyfish now dominate the waters off the coast of Namibia. Hungry snails and fungi are overrunning coastal marshes in North Carolina, causing them to disintegrate. In the northwestern Atlantic, lobsters are proliferating while cod have crashed.
Whether by fishing, converting land into farms and cities, or warming the planet, humanity is putting tremendous stresses on the world’s ecosystems.
Carpenter, taking advantage of 30 years of ecological research at Peter Lake, Carpenter and his colleagues developed mathematical models of ecological networks that allowed them to pick up early-warning signs of the change that was coming, 15 months before its food web flipped.
Food webs are complex, but mathematical models can reveal critical links that, if disturbed, can cause the webs to flip to a different state, including collapse.
Once the flipping of food webs takes place, they are often unlikely to return to their original state. Experiments in Peter Lake and Paul Lake near the Michigan-Wisconsin border are showing that models can predict a flip before it occurs, giving ecologists a chance to alter an ecosystem and pull it back from the brink.
Top predators often control the chain—directly and indirectly.
Ecologists have turned food webs into mathematical models.
They write an equation for the growth of one species by linking its reproduction rate to how much food it can obtain and how often it gets eaten by other species.
Top predators have a huge impact in ecosystems. Eliminating the top predators allows for the their preys to flourish. Without the top predators other species are allow to flourish because their predators have being eliminated. Trying to reestablish the original ecosystems is nearly impossible. The scientists in this article change the ecosystem of Peter Lake. They came up with an equation that determine the turning point of an ecosystem. This equation is helpful. But sometimes it's no use because of the rapid change that ecosystems undergo.They realized that ecosystems that are disturbed can change entirely with no hope ever reestablishing the original ecosystem.
Its very interesting how a top predator is important to ecosystems. I would have never thought that top predators have a connection to little species and plants. It's devastating to know that we are the cause of the ecosystems dramatic rapid change. While scientists have come with an equation to determine the turning point of ecosystem.