Propagating Meaning Across Standpoints: Food-Web Chains and a Biotic Divergence over an Ecological Knowledge Graph

Abstract

The Parallax operation treats the divergence between co-located standpoints, where the same environmental value carries opposite meaning for two species sharing a place, as a first-class object over an ecological knowledge graph. This paper reports three findings from extending that operation with a chain tool, and the most useful is a failure: run broadly across fifty-four species in nine European ecosystems, the divergence detector found nothing, because the graph was too thin and unit-inconsistent to difference, not because the living world lacks divergences. That negative result reframed the method from broad sweep to targeted deep-dive: one place, one signal, the full co-occurring community sourced to a single unit. A chain tool then walks the interaction graph outward from the harmed species and reaches organisms several hops away that are implicated but never sense the signal, a temperature a freshwater pearl mussel cannot register reaching it through the salmonid its larvae must parasitise; a dissolved-oxygen value reaching a goose three hops on. Every hop carries its relation, direction, and a confidence that decays per documented interaction; chains are ranked hypotheses, never claims. The sharpest divergence is a pathogen, the crayfish plague, read as lethal by the native crayfish and safe by the invading carrier at the identical value.