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We examine the effect of adaptive foraging behaviour within a tri-trophic food web with intra-guild predation. The intra-guild prey is allowed to adjust its foraging effort so as to achieve an optimal per capita growth rate in the face of realized feeding, predation risk and foraging cost. Adaptive fitness-seeking behaviour of the intra-guild prey has a stabilizing effect on the tri-trophic food-web dynamics provided that (i) a finite optimal foraging effort exists and (ii) the trophic transfer efficiency from resource to predator via the intra-guild prey is greater than that from the resource directly. The latter condition is a general criterion for the feasibility of intra-guild predation as a trophic mode. Under these conditions, we demonstrate rigorously that adaptive behaviour will always promote stability of community dynamics in the sense that the region of parameter space in which stability is achieved is larger than for the non-adaptive counterpart of the system.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2011.0686 | DOI Listing |
Mar Environ Res
February 2025
Estación de Fotobiología Playa Unión (EFPU), Casilla de Correos 15, 9103, Rawson, Chubut, Argentina; Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Argentina.
Plankton communities are subjected to multiple global change drivers; however, it is unknown how the interplay between them deviates from predictions based on single-driver studies, in particular when trophic interactions are explicitly considered. We investigated how simultaneous manipulation of temperature, pH, nutrient availability and solar radiation quality affects the carbon transfer from phytoplankton to herbivorous protists and their potential consequences for ecosystem functioning. Our results showed that multiple interacting global-change drivers reduced the photosynthetic (gross primary production-to-electron transport rates ratios, from 0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInterspecific competition can significantly impact marine ecosystems by affecting species distributions and abundances. Understanding how sympatric species utilize available food helps identify potential competition and its effects when resources are limited. Here, we applied a suite of analytical methods (diet analysis, stable isotopes, and biomass estimates) to identify potential competitive interactions among North Pacific pelagic predators.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPredators compete for resources aggressively, forming trophic hierarchies that shape the structure of an ecosystem. Competitive interactions between species are modified in the human-altered environment and become particularly important where an introduced predator can have negative effects on native predator and prey species. The trans-Himalayan region of northern India has seen significant development in tourism and associated infrastructure over the last two decades, resulting in many changes to the natural setting of the landscape.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEcology
June 2022
Faculty of Science, University of South Bohemia, České Budějovice, Czech Republic.
The relative roles of plants competing for resources versus top-down control of vegetation by herbivores, in turn impacted by predators, during early stages of tropical forest succession remain poorly understood. Here we examine the impact of insectivorous birds, bats, and ants exclusion on arthropods communities on replicated 5 × 5 m of pioneering early successional vegetation plots in lowland tropical forest gaps in Papua New Guinea. In plots from which focal taxa of predators were excluded we observed increased biomass of herbivorous and predatory arthropods, and increased density, and decreased diversity of herbivorous insects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiol Rev Camb Philos Soc
August 2022
School of Life and Environmental Sciences, Heydon-Laurence Building A08, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia.
Both fire and predators have strong influences on the population dynamics and behaviour of animals, and the effects of predators may either be strengthened or weakened by fire. However, knowledge of how fire drives or mediates predator-prey interactions is fragmented and has not been synthesised. Here, we review and synthesise knowledge of how fire influences predator and prey behaviour and interactions.
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