Department of Entomology, Washington State University, Pullman, WA 99164, USA.
Ecol Lett. 2010 Mar;13(3):338-48. doi: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2009.01428.x.
More diverse communities of consumers typically use more resources, which often is attributed to resource partitioning. However, experimentally demonstrating this role of resource partitioning in diverse communities has been difficult. We used an experimental response-surface design, varying intra- and interspecific consumer densities, to compare patterns of resource exploitation between simple and diverse communities of aphid predators. With increasing density, each single consumer species rapidly plateaued in its ability to extract more resources. This suggests intraspecific competition for a subset of the resource pool, a hallmark of resource partitioning. In contrast, more diverse-predator communities achieved greater overall resource depletion. By statistically fitting mechanistic models to the data, we demonstrated that resource partitioning rather than facilitation provides the better explanation for the observed differences in resource use between simple and diverse communities. This model-fitting approach also allowed us to quantify overlap in resource use by different consumer species.
更多样化的消费者群体通常使用更多的资源，这通常归因于资源分区。然而，在多样化的消费者群体中，实验证明这种资源分区的作用一直具有挑战性。我们使用了一个实验响应面设计，改变了种内和种间消费者的密度，以比较简单和多样化的蚜虫捕食者群落之间的资源利用模式。随着密度的增加，每个单一的消费者物种在提取更多资源的能力上迅速达到平台期。这表明存在种内竞争，争夺资源库的一部分，这是资源分区的一个标志。相比之下，更多样化的捕食者群落实现了更大的整体资源消耗。通过对数据进行统计拟合机械模型，我们证明资源分区而不是促进作用为简单和多样化群落之间观察到的资源利用差异提供了更好的解释。这种模型拟合方法还使我们能够量化不同消费者物种之间资源利用的重叠。
