Fictional responses from Vonesh et al.
Jaimie T. A. Dick, Mhairi E. Alexander, Anthony P. Ricciardi, Ciaran Laverty, Paul Downey, Meng Xu, Jonathan M. Jeschke, Wolf‐Christian Saul, Matthew P. Hill, Ryan John Wasserman, Daniel Barrios‐O’Neill, Olaf L. F. Weyl, Richard Shaw · Biological Invasions · 2017
2017) in their critique of Dick et al. (2017) erect a straw man with their thought experiment; they look for reasons why comparative functional response (CFR) might fail, when CFR clearly and repeatedly succeeds.We can view CFR as a hypothesis that posits ''differences in magnitude, or shape, of invader/native FRs explain and predict invader ecological impact''.We can test this hypothesis with a mini-meta-analysis: in 18 out of 22 study systems, and 39 of 47 individual CFR studies, FRs of known damaging invaders are significantly higher than FRs of native counterparts (Dick et al. in press).These systems consider 1-5 pairwise resource comparisons; large numbers are not needed for CFR to have high explanatory and predictive power (and practical utility in targeted studies).Vonesh et al. (2017) list reasons why CFR studies should fail: differing conversion efficiencies, mortality, interference, body size,