The Power Law Applies to the Ocean as Well
This article, titled “Humans Have Broken One of the Natural Power Laws Governing Earth’s Oceans”, looks into how the concept of power laws may also be applied to ocean ecosystems- how different populations of different species’ will change in flux to one another. The article first begins by cementing the concept of power laws as the distribution when two different quantities change in proportional relation to one another, a concept that we also learned in class. Power-law relationships are much more unequal in terms of numbers- if one follows a power law, the more numerous quantities being discussed will be a lot more numerous, while the less numerous quantities will be much less numerous. If one quantity increases, the other corresponding quantity would decrease. For the specific article, the authors noted proportions between larger yet less abundant species’ to smaller yet more abundant species’. The proportion was more equal, indicating a smaller exponent of the power law which turned out to be x^-1.04. Factors that might act as explanation for this relationship include growth rates, metabolism, and predator-prey interactions, though this is all just speculation.
I find the article interesting and in-line with the content of the class that we have learned and discussed. It was especially interesting to look at a power-law distribution that was much less extreme than those that we learned in class. With an exponent barely greater than 1, the values were a lot more proportional to one another than what we learned in class with higher exponents that illustrated a much more drastic difference between the greatest, most popular values and the smallest, least popular values. Seeing these mathematical theories ultimately applied to the natural world is both very interesting, but also very satisfying to see the applications and implications of the class’ content.
https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-have-broken-the-natural-law-of-life-s-size-spectrum-in-the-ocean