🐋 Ocean Trophic Web Dynamics

About this simulation

A marine food web is a network of feeding relationships linking producers (phytoplankton, kelp) up through herbivores, mid-level predators, and apex predators. Removing or restoring just one strongly-connected species — a keystone species — can ripple through the whole web far out of proportion to that species' own biomass. This is called a trophic cascade.

How it works

• Each glowing cluster is a species; cluster size scales with its simulated population.
• Moving the keystone population slider changes that species' population directly.
• Every other species in the same feeding chain reacts: prey one link away lose population (more predation pressure), prey two links away gain population (released from their own predator's predator), alternating up the chain — the classic cascade pattern.
• Cascade strength scales how far and how strongly the effect propagates.
• Species outside the selected chain stay near their baseline population.

Controls

• Keystone species — switch between three classic real-world examples: orcas, sea otters, and ochre sea stars.
• Keystone population — 0–200% of the natural baseline population.
• Cascade strength — how strongly the effect decays with each trophic step.
• Energy-flow particles — animates particles flowing from prey to predator along the active chain.
• ↺ Reset populations — restores all sliders to their baseline values.

Did you know?

When sea otters were hunted to near-extinction along the Pacific coast, sea urchin populations exploded and devoured entire kelp forests, turning them into barren rock. Otter reintroduction let kelp forests recover — one of ecology's best-documented trophic cascades.