Skip to main content
Dryad

Foraging preferences and interspecific competition generate multimodal complexity-stability relationships in an adaptive food-web framework

Data files

Jan 24, 2023 version files 11.27 KB

Abstract

Ecological theory predicts that complex ecological networks are unstable and are unlikely to persist, despite many empirical studies of such complexity in nature. To resolve real complexity-stability relationships, coupling population dynamics and trait dynamics is considered to be an important way to understand the long-term stability of ecological community assemblages. However, modelling eco-evolutionary dynamics in ecologically realistic networks is still a challenge. Here, we establish an adaptive food web model to evaluate the complexity-stability debate in a mutualist-exploiters-specialist forager-generalist forager system. Our theoretical model predicts that the connectance-stability relationship may show positive monotonic (/), negative monotonic (\), peaked (∩) and double-peaked (oscillatory) patterns. Moreover, the double-peaked pattern is only obtained when both the adaptation intensity and interspecific competition are high, which may explain no complexity-stability relationships revealed in empirical data. Finally, we deduce that foraging adaptation alters positive and/or negative feedback loops to affect the stability of real food webs.