Community ecologists draw “food webs” to describe the predator and prey relationships between all organisms living in an area. A theoretical model predicts that a measure of the structure of food webs called “diet discontinuity” should be zero. Diet discontinuity is a measure of the relative numbers of predators whose prey are not ordered contiguously.

Researchers have measured discontinuity scores for seven different food webs in nature. The values are given below (Cattin et al. 2004).

Assume that discontinuity in natural food webs has a normal distribution. Are the results consistent with the model’s prediction of a zero mean discontinuity score? Carry out an appropriate hypothesis test.

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0.35,0.35, 0.08,0.08, 0.004,0.004, 0.08,0.08, 0.32,0.32, 0.28,0.28, 0.170.17