The effects of intraspecific and interspecific diversity on food web stability
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ORIGINAL PAPER
The effects of intraspecific and interspecific diversity on food web stability Akana E. Noto 1
&
Tarik C. Gouhier 1
Received: 22 August 2019 / Accepted: 29 April 2020 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Although the effects of species diversity on food web stability have long been recognized, relatively little is known about the influence of intraspecific diversity. Empirical work has found that intraspecific diversity can increase community resilience and resistance, but few theoretical studies have attempted to use modeling approaches to determine how intraspecific diversity will affect food web stability. To begin to address this knowledge gap, we added intraspecific diversity to May’s classic random food web model. We found that, like species diversity, intraspecific diversity decreased stability. These effects on stability were not simply attributable to changes in interaction strengths, suggesting that intraspecific diversity can have its own independent effects on stability. Its effect depends on the relationship between inter- and intra-genotype interactions; when competition within genotypes was stronger than among them, food webs were generally more stable than when the converse was true. Overall, our model suggests that determining the direction and the magnitude of intraspecific diversity’s effects on stability in natural systems will require more empirical information about how its inclusion alters patterns of interaction strength and food web topology. Keywords Intraspecific diversity . Genetic diversity . Diversity-stability relationship . Food webs
Introduction The relationship between biodiversity and the stability of trophically structured communities has long been a topic of interest in ecology. Empirical work and early intuitions suggested that greater species diversity would stabilize communities (reviewed by McCann, 2000). For example, Elton (1958) observed that diverse natural communities were less frequently invaded by herbivorous pests than species-poor, human-altered habitats such as agricultural fields. Yet early theoretical work on community stability by May (1972) found that increasing the number of species in a randomly constructed food web was destabilizing. Thus, there seemed to be
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12080-020-00460-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Akana E. Noto [email protected] 1
Northeastern University Marine Science Center, Nahant, MA, USA
substantial contradictions between empirical observations and theoretical predictions about biodiversity’s impact on stability. In the years following May’s seminal study, scientists sought to resolve this discrepancy between empirical and theoretical expectations. One avenue of research found that diversity often promotes the occurrence of weak species interactions in real food webs (Wootton 1997; Kokkoris et al. 1999; McCann 2000). Weak interactions can stabilize communities by dampening the fluc
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