Analytical solution of a model for complex food webs

Juan Camacho, Roger Guimera, Luis A. N. Amaral

Published 2001-02-07, updated 2002-05-14Version 2

We investigate numerically and analytically a recently proposed model for food webs [Nature {\bf 404}, 180 (2000)] in the limit of large web sizes and sparse interaction matrices. We obtain analytical expressions for several quantities with ecological interest, in particular the probability distributions for the number of prey and the number of predators. We find that these distributions have fast-decaying exponential and Gaussian tails, respectively. We also find that our analytical expressions are robust to changes in the details of the model.