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No such thing as a free lunch: interaction costs and the structure and stability of mutualistic networks
Author(s) -
Peralta Guadalupe,
Stouffer Daniel B.,
Bringa Eduardo M.,
Vázquez Diego P.
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
oikos
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.672
H-Index - 179
eISSN - 1600-0706
pISSN - 0030-1299
DOI - 10.1111/oik.06503
Subject(s) - mutualism (biology) , community structure , stability (learning theory) , nestedness , network structure , ecology , modularity (biology) , abundance (ecology) , ecological network , resilience (materials science) , biology , psychological resilience , population , species richness , population structure , ecological stability , ecosystem , computer science , evolutionary biology , psychology , social psychology , distributed computing , machine learning , physics , sociology , demography , thermodynamics
Different modelling approaches have been used to relate the structure of mutualistic interactions with the stability of communities. However, inconsistencies arise when we compare modelling outcomes with the patterns of interactions observed in empirical studies. To shed light on these inconsistencies, we explored the network structure–stability relationship by incorporating the cost of mutualistic interactions, a long ignored feature of mutualisms, into population dynamics models. We assessed the changes in the relationship between network structure (species richness, connectance, modularity) and community stability (species persistence, resilience), and between network structure and community structural attributes (average abundance), using models with increasing levels of cost for mutualistic communities. We found that adding the potential cost of mutualistic interactions affected the strength of the network structure–stability relationship. Our results revive the question of whether the structure of mutualistic networks determines community stability.