Aim Available theories suggest that the species number increases with island size, but the relationship between island size and species density, the number of species per unit area, is less understood. Moreover, mechanisms connecting island size and species density are not always evident because small and large islands differ in physical characteristics other than island size. The purpose here was to disentangle direct and ind...

Terrestrial predators on marine shores benefit from the inflow of organisms and matter from the marine ecosystem, often causing very high predator densities and indirectly affecting the abundance of other prey species on shores. This indirect effect may be particularly strong if predators shift diets between seasons. We therefore quantified the seasonal variation in diet of two wolf spider species that dominate the shoreline p...