Here, we argue that this novel heterogeneity will drive mobile generalist consumer species to rapidly respond through their behaviour in ways that broadly and predictably reorganize — or rewire — food webs.
Across all network levels we consistently find that phylogenetic relatedness among resource species is correlated with consumer overlap but that phylogenetic relatedness among consumer species is not or negatively correlated with resource overlap.
Most consumer species exhibit some dietary flexibility or utilise more dependable resources; these strategies give rise to greater stability in species dynamics and composition of assemblages than might first be imagined under the variable rainfall regime.
This pervasive pattern indicates that the antagonistic network has been shaped by both phylogeny on resource range and by exploitative competition limiting resource overlap among closely related consumer species.
Coexistence of cycling and dispersing consumer species: Armstrong and McGehee in space.
When consumer species differ in their effects on resource demography, the resulting system dynamics can be surprising, including competitive coexistence or exclusion in otherwise unexpected situations.
By inflicting damage to prey tissues, consumer species may increase stress in prey hosts and reduce overall fitness (i.e., primary effects, such as growth or reproduction) or cause secondary effects by affecting prey interactions with other species such as microbes.
One implication of the dynamics described above is that distinct host demographic responses to different consumer species can enable mutualists to persist in the presence of apparently competitively superior exploiters.
Two competing consumer species may coexist using a single homogeneous resource when the more efficient consumer--the one having the lowest equilibrium resource density--has a more nonlinear functional response that generates consumer-resource cycles.
Gourley and Kuang [16] formulated a robust stage-structured predator-prey model with the assumption that stage-structured consumer species growth is a combined result of birth and death processes, both of which are closely linked to the dynamical supply of resource.
ri is the intrinsic growth rate of consumer species i, which is not affected by consumption of the resource species R. We assume that the consumer species can compete for two resources with another consumer species.
