The process of representing food webs as interval competition graphs

A food web is defined as an acyclic graph where vertices represent different species and there is a directed edge from species x to species y if species x preys on species y. Food webs are important in Biology because they model the flow of energy in an ecosystem. A competition graph has the same vertex set as a food web, but now two vertices are adjacent if they prey on a common species in the food web. Most of these competition graphs are interval graphs. Interval graphs are graphs where vertices can be represented as intervals of the real line such that vertices are adjacent if and only if their intervals overlap. In this talk, we will explain these structures and their relationships with real examples from Biology.