Structural properties of the stage-structured food webs
The structural properties and characteristics of the 30000 original stage-structured food webs generated by the modified niche model were quantified on the unweighted networks (Fig. A3). The majority of the 60 nodes were invertebrates, followed by 8 to 30 life-history stages of fishes (2 to 6 species as specified) and 3-12 autotrophs. Between 6 and 30 fish stages were piscivorous (their diets included fish), while 3 to 28 of them had autotrophs in their diets. Fishes were almost all cannibalistic at some stage. Omnivores (feeding at 2 or more trophic levels) were abundant (45 to 50 species). Each fish stage had about 16 prey species and 7 predators on average. The mean maximum trophic level was near 5. Almost all interactions involved intermediate taxa (taxa with both prey and predators). About a half of the webs did not have a top predator (taxa without a predator), while the rest had one top predator. The sensitivity analysis showed that these patterns remained almost identical when \(\text{OL}_{\min}\) was reduced to 10 %, while the number of fish stages decreased along with other measures as a direct consequence of having fewer fish stages when\(\text{NStage}_{\min}\), and \(\text{NStage}_{\max}\) were decreased (Fig. A3).