MUCH of the edifice of community ecology is built upon the study of mteractions involving pairs or small webs of species. This is perfectly sensible, for communities are in many ways akin to docks to understand what makes a dock tick, a good startingpoint is to fiddle with small ensembles of interacting cogs. Employing such an approach, Begon, Sait and Thompson (page 311 of this issue) show how the dynamics of simple species webs are more than just the apparent sum of their parts.
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