Figure 2.

Analysis of the St Mark's food web. (a) The black node is the root of the web. The red links are redundant and can be deleted without affecting the robustness of the food web and the black links are functional. (b(i),(ii)) Functional and redundant connections for species 10. The total number of connections is 22, of which just 11 are functional. Species' importance for robustness should be evaluated using functional connections only, as the total number of connections can be misleading.