California Rocky Intertidal Food Web

Welcome to the California Rocky Intertidal Food Web interactive visualization tool!

This food web network was created as part of an ongoing research project based in the Parasite Ecology Lab at the University of California Santa Barbara. We have compiled interaction reports from published scientific literature, intertidal guidebooks, our own field and lab studies, and expert testimony to generate this network. The network currently represents 1845 taxa and over 13,000 unique trophic links, including grazing, predation, scavenging, and parasitism. The raw data and usage suggestions are available at https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.3ffbg79sb.

The iconic California rocky intertidal zone at low tide in Santa Barbara, CA. Photo credit: Zoe Zilz.

To use this tool, simply select your organismal category of interest using the drop down menu. You can also interact with the web by hovering over individual “nodes”, which will display the associated taxon or group name. You can even delete nodes to visualize the cascading effects of extinction! Node colors represent the consumer strategy of that node, and link colors are inherited from the consumer node in a consumer-resource pair. Arrows point from resource to consumer, demonstrating the flow of energy. Clicking on nodes will highlight all links connected to that node up to two degrees of separation. You can also drag the nodes around and change the shape of the network display!

This topographic graph is organized so that the lowest trophic levels (e.g. primary producers like algae) are at the bottom, and the rest of the nodes are vertically arranged based on their trophic levels such that top predators (and their parasites) are at the very top!

If you have questions about this ongoing research or wish to report a species interaction for inclusion in the web, please contact us by emailing our project lead, Zoe Zilz, at zilz@ucsb.edu.

This project has been generously funded by the Worster Family and the UCSB Coastal Fund