Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14853, USA; Department of Food and Environmental Sciences/Microbiology, University of Helsinki, Viikki Biocenter, FIN-00014, Helsinki, Finland.
Ecol Lett. 2014 Aug;17(8):915-23. doi: 10.1111/ele.12291. Epub 2014 May 12.
Consumer-resource interactions are fundamental components of ecological communities. Classic features of consumer-resource models are that temporal dynamics are often cyclic, with a ¼-period lag between resource and consumer population peaks. However, there are few published empirical examples of this pattern. Here, we show that many published examples of consumer-resource cycling show instead patterns indicating eco-evolutionary dynamics. When prey evolve along a trade-off between defence and competitive ability, two-species consumer-resource cycles become longer and antiphase (half-period lag, so consumer maxima coincide with minima of the resource species). Using stringent criteria, we identified 21 two-species consumer-resource time series, published between 1934 and 1997, suitable to investigate for eco-evolutionary dynamics. We developed a statistical method to probe for a transition from classic to eco-evolutionary cycles, and find evidence for eco-evolutionary type cycles in about half of the studies. We show that rapid prey evolution is the most likely explanation for the observed patterns.
消费者-资源相互作用是生态群落的基本组成部分。消费者-资源模型的经典特征是，时间动态通常是周期性的，资源和消费者种群峰值之间存在四分之一周期的滞后。然而，很少有发表的经验实例证明这种模式。在这里，我们表明，许多已发表的消费者-资源循环实例显示的是表明生态进化动态的模式。当猎物沿着防御和竞争能力之间的权衡进化时，两种物种的消费者-资源循环会变得更长，并且相反（半周期滞后，因此消费者最大值与资源物种的最小值重合）。使用严格的标准，我们确定了 21 个两种物种的消费者-资源时间序列，这些时间序列发表于 1934 年至 1997 年之间，适合研究生态进化动态。我们开发了一种统计方法来探测从经典到生态进化循环的转变，并在大约一半的研究中发现了生态进化型循环的证据。我们表明，快速的猎物进化是观察到的模式的最可能解释。
