Finke Deborah L, Snyder William E
Department of Entomology, Washington State University, Pullman, WA 99164, USA.
Science. 2008 Sep 12;321(5895):1488-90. doi: 10.1126/science.1160854.
Classical ecological theory suggests that the coexistence of consumer species is fostered by resource-use differences, leading to greater resource use in communities with more species. However, explicit empirical support for this idea is lacking, because resource use by species is generally confounded with other species-specific attributes. We overcame this obstacle by co-opting behavioral plasticity in food choice among a group of animal consumers, allowing us to manipulate patterns of resource use while controlling for the effects of species identity and diversity. Within an aphid-parasitoid-radish community, we created a fully factorial manipulation of consumer resource-use breadth (specialist versus generalist) and species diversity (one versus three species) and found that resource exploitation improved with greater specialist, but not generalist, diversity. Therefore, resource partitioning, and not diversity per se, fostered greater overall resource consumption in our multispecies consumer communities.
经典生态理论表明，消费者物种的共存是由资源利用差异促成的，这导致物种较多的群落具有更高的资源利用率。然而，这一观点缺乏明确的实证支持，因为物种的资源利用通常与其他物种特有的属性相互混淆。我们通过利用一组动物消费者在食物选择上的行为可塑性克服了这一障碍，使我们能够在控制物种身份和多样性影响的同时操纵资源利用模式。在一个蚜虫-寄生蜂-萝卜群落中，我们对消费者资源利用广度（ specialists与generalist）和物种多样性（一个物种与三个物种）进行了完全析因操纵，发现随着 specialists多样性的增加，资源开发得到改善，但generalist多样性增加则不然。因此，在我们的多物种消费者群落中，促进整体资源消耗增加的是资源分配，而非多样性本身。
