Food webs, the networks of feeding links between species, are central to our understanding of ecosystem structure, stability, and function. For decades, studies of food webs informed about issues such as how extinctions or invasions alter communities. However, recorded food webs are a caricature of real communities; they capture important information, but ignore ecologically relevant characteristics of organisms. One such characteristic is that organisms adaptively choose their diets, responding to temporal and spatial variation in resource availability and other limiting factors. That is, organisms' and species' diets are dynamic. Food webs, however, generally represent diets as unchanging. This symposium aims to explore the advances and opportunities that have been and can be realised by merging individual scale theory of adaptive behaviour with the currently static description of species in food webs.

The symposium will build on recent progress in food web research by integrating behavioural ecology, allometry, population ecology, and community ecology in a a multi-disciplinary effort to understand how individual behaviour scales to community and ecosystem pattern and process. Talks will fill a spectrum of perspectives from individual behaviour to community patterns; will draw on expertise from network biology, population and community dynamics, and behavioural ecology; and will span concepts, theory, observation, and experimental approaches. Speakers will explore how the structure and dynamics of populations and communities can be understood by including aspects of individual behaviour, such as foraging decisions and habitat selection.

Following an introductions, speakers will address: opposing perspectives concerning what behavioural ecology can offer community ecology, and what community ecology can offer behavioural ecology; effects of adaptive foraging on relationships between complexity and stability in simple and more complex communities; how attention to behaviour of individuals can shed light on the scaling of trophic interactions with body size in food webs and other networks; and, finally, experimental studies demonstrating the significance of adaptive behaviour and how management and conservation of population, communities, and ecosystems could be informed by its study.