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Interactive effects of body‐size structure and adaptive foraging on food‐web stability
Author(s) -
Heckmann Lotta,
Drossel Barbara,
Brose Ulrich,
Guill Christian
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
ecology letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 6.852
H-Index - 265
eISSN - 1461-0248
pISSN - 1461-023X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2011.01733.x
Subject(s) - foraging , optimal foraging theory , food web , ecology , ecosystem , stability (learning theory) , niche , ecological stability , adaptation (eye) , food chain , biology , computer science , machine learning , neuroscience
Ecology Letters (2012) Abstract Body‐size structure of food webs and adaptive foraging of consumers are two of the dominant concepts of our understanding how natural ecosystems maintain their stability and diversity. The interplay of these two processes, however, is a critically important yet unresolved issue. To fill this gap in our knowledge of ecosystem stability, we investigate dynamic random and niche model food webs to evaluate the proportion of persistent species. We show that stronger body‐size structures and faster adaptation stabilise these food webs. Body‐size structures yield stabilising configurations of interaction strength distributions across food webs, and adaptive foraging emphasises links to resources closer to the base. Moreover, both mechanisms combined have a cumulative effect. Most importantly, unstructured random webs evolve via adaptive foraging into stable size‐structured food webs. This offers a mechanistic explanation of how size structure adaptively emerges in complex food webs, thus building a novel bridge between these two important stabilising mechanisms.