Abstract:
The dominant paradigm for modeling the complexities of interacting populations and food webs is a system
of coupled ordinary differential equations in which the state of each species, population, or functional trophic group is
represented by an aggregated numbers-density or biomass-density variable. Here, using the metaphysiological approach to
model consumer-resource interactions, we formulate a two-state paradigm that represents each population or group in a
food web in terms of both its quantity and quality.