Abrupt community transitions and cyclic evolutionary dynamics in complex food webs
Authored by Ulf Dieckmann, Daisuke Takahashi, Ake Brannstrom, Rupert Mazzucco, Atsushi Yamauchi
Date Published: 2013
DOI: 10.1016/j.jtbi.2013.08.003
Sponsors:
European Science Foundation
European Union
Austrian Science Fund (FWF)
Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research
Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS)
Vienna Science and Technology Fund
Platforms:
No platforms listed
Model Documentation:
Other Narrative
Flow charts
Mathematical description
Model Code URLs:
Model code not found
Abstract
Understanding the emergence and maintenance of biodiversity ranks among
the most fundamental challenges in evolutionary ecology. While processes
of community assembly have frequently been analyzed from an ecological
perspective, their evolutionary dimensions have so far received less
attention. To elucidate the eco-evolutionary processes underlying the
long-term build-up and potential collapse of community diversity, here
we develop and examine an individual-based model describing
coevolutionary dynamics driven by trophic interactions and interference
competition, of a pair of quantitative traits determining predator and
prey niches. Our results demonstrate the (1) emergence of communities
with multiple trophic levels, shown here for the first time for
stochastic models with linear functional responses, and (2) intermittent
and cyclic evolutionary transitions between two alternative community
states. In particular, our results indicate that the interplay of
ecological and evolutionary dynamics often results in extinction
cascades that remove the entire trophic level of consumers from a
community. Finally, we show the (3) robustness of our results under
variations of model assumptions, underscoring that processes of consumer
collapse and subsequent rebound could be important elements of
understanding biodiversity dynamics in natural communities. (C) 2013 The
Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Tags
emergence
Coevolution
ecology
Trophic structure
Model
stability
Population-dynamics
Coupled chemical-reactions
Self-organized criticality
Long-term
evolution