This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: An interdisciplinary team of researchers has created an open-source website for learning what different organisms eat and what eats them. The site—called Who Eats Whom—draws on data from a worldwide citizen science platform and serves as both a valuable resource for ecological research and an educational tool to advance public understanding of the global food web.
"Our understanding of what different organisms eat is incomplete and is often scattered across the academic literature," says Bradley Allf, corresponding author of a paper on the work who began the project while in graduate school at North Carolina State University. "An online platform called iNaturalist captures people's observations of organisms and has been used to advance our understanding of which organisms live in different locations. This work expands on that, tapping into information on iNaturalist about trophic interactions—what organisms eat—to create a publicly available website that could be used to shed light on feeding interactions." Allf is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Colorado State University.
"I came to this project because I'm interested in designing usable interactive tools and learning environments," says Aditi Mallavarapu, co-author of the paper and an assistant professor of computer science at NC State. "Complex problems are particularly appealing, and the food web is an incredibly complex system. We wanted to create a website that would be usable, visually engaging and ethical in how it handled data contributed by citizen scientists.
We wanted this to help both researchers and the public understand these complex feeding relationships." To that end, the researchers created the Who Eats Whom project, tapping into the iNaturalist platform, where the public can share photos, videos and audio of organisms. Specifically, the project allows iNaturalist users to submit details of feeding interactions by explicitly tagging both predator and prey in photos and videos (though the "predator" could be an herbivore and the "prey" could be a plant). "Basically, Who Eats Whom gives us information on what different species eat and what eats different species," Allf says.
Who Eats Whom observations are cataloged on an easily searchable website, allowing users to explore the trophic interactions that have been recorded. To date, the project has logged approximately 17,000 observations of trophic interactions involving about 5,700 species. The observations have come from around 2,000 observers in more than 100 countries.
"One of the interesting observations at this point is the extent to which the public is interested not only in charismatic predators like lions or wolves, but in smaller trophic relationships such as the insects that eat persimmon leaves," says Mallavarapu. "People are using the site to explore a wide variety of trophic relationships tied to their personal interests and local surroundings." "Moving forward, we can use Who Eats Whom to identify novel trophic relationships that we can contribute to the academic literature," says Allf. Discover the latest in science, tech, and space with over 100,000 subscribers who rely on Phys.org for daily insights. d research that matter—daily or weekly.
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