Food webs and simple graphics.

Abstract Food webs are fundamental in much of ecology and there has been a steady increase in studying their structure and properties over the past 50 years, nowadays often utilizing molecular methods too. First, this chapter will create code to draw a food web, then it will introduce the package cheddar. The reason for learning how to produce your own is not just to improve programming skill and logical thinking, it also means you are in a position to customize your diagrams in ways that perhaps are not available in pre-written packages. A parasitoid foodweb example is given. In this example from Thailand, 22 braconid parasitoid wasps, representing a total of 9 species were associated with 22 lepidopteran hosts representing a total of 11 species using DNA barcoding.