Study
Animal Ecology
Elton, Charles
Sidgwick & Jackson, 1927
Sets out food chains and food cycles as the organising structure of animal communities, together with the observation that numbers and body sizes are distributed systematically across feeding levels.
- Studied in
- Animalia
- Sample size
- synthesis of field natural history into a general framework
Animal communities can be described by who eats whom, with characteristic patterns in the numbers and sizes of organisms at successive feeding levels.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Feeding relationships are the structural framework of an animal community and provide a general basis for ecology.
How NatureHQ reads it
The origin of the food chain as a way of thinking, and of the ecological niche in its earlier, role-based sense. Worth reading with the later critiques beside it: the linear chain was always an abstraction from something messier, and it was offered as one.
- A framework rather than a dataset; the simplifications it introduced were later shown to matter.
- Written before quantitative food-web data existed at any scale.
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Published by: Public-domain scientific works
doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.7435
Checked against Crossref on 2026-09-28, and they agree on the title, the authors and the year.
NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-09-04.