produce well-documented food web patterns, instead of statistically inferring likely mechanisms from In an attempt to explain ‘Why are there so many kinds these patterns. The ADBM is a model which c- of animals?’ Hutchinson (1959) listed and discussed, bines the constraints imposed by body size on many in his productive and fertile paper, several ideas biological variables (allometric of foraging variables) related to diversity of animals or the lack of it, with optimal foraging theory in order to predict including suggestions on possible mechanistic exp- structural properties of consumer-resource food webs nations. Later (Hutchinson, 1961) stated them explic- (Petchey et al. , 2008; Beckerman et al. , 2006). This itly for the plankton community, and another authors model, which according to these authors has been (i. e. Scheffer et al. , 2003), following his trail until the proved successful for plankton communities, allows present time, have used plankton as a model for the us to determine the speci?c resource–consumer links understanding of ecological diversity, and demon- and then evaluate the diet breadth for each consumer. strated that Hutchinson’s ideas are still useful Therefore, it enables to test how much diets overlap nowadays. Among other suggestions, Hutchinson and hence to quantify the implication of the afo- highlighted the food web context to suggest that mentioned biological mechanism in structuring diversity of primary producers should allow ma- plankton communities in the ?eld.weiterlesen