Institut fur Festkörperphysik, TU Darmstadt, Hochschulstrasse 6, Darmstadt, Germany.
Ecol Lett. 2012 Mar;15(3):243-50. doi: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2011.01733.x. Epub 2012 Jan 26.
Body-size structure of food webs and adaptive foraging of consumers are two of the dominant concepts of our understanding how natural ecosystems maintain their stability and diversity. The interplay of these two processes, however, is a critically important yet unresolved issue. To fill this gap in our knowledge of ecosystem stability, we investigate dynamic random and niche model food webs to evaluate the proportion of persistent species. We show that stronger body-size structures and faster adaptation stabilise these food webs. Body-size structures yield stabilising configurations of interaction strength distributions across food webs, and adaptive foraging emphasises links to resources closer to the base. Moreover, both mechanisms combined have a cumulative effect. Most importantly, unstructured random webs evolve via adaptive foraging into stable size-structured food webs. This offers a mechanistic explanation of how size structure adaptively emerges in complex food webs, thus building a novel bridge between these two important stabilising mechanisms.
生物体型结构的食物网和消费者的适应性觅食是我们理解自然生态系统如何维持其稳定性和多样性的两个主要概念。然而，这两个过程的相互作用是一个至关重要但尚未解决的问题。为了填补我们对生态系统稳定性知识的空白，我们研究了动态随机和生态位模型食物网，以评估持久物种的比例。我们表明，更强的生物体型结构和更快的适应能力可以稳定这些食物网。生物体型结构产生了跨食物网的相互作用强度分布的稳定配置，而适应性觅食则强调了与更接近基础的资源的联系。此外，这两种机制结合起来具有累积效应。最重要的是，无结构的随机网络通过适应性觅食演变成稳定的大小结构食物网。这为体型结构如何通过适应性在复杂食物网中出现提供了一个机制解释，从而在这两个重要的稳定机制之间建立了一个新的桥梁。
