Araujo Gui, Lurgi Miguel
Department of Biosciences, Swansea University, Swansea, United Kingdom.
PLoS Comput Biol. 2025 Sep 2;21(9):e1013402. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013402. eCollection 2025 Sep.
Unveiling the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms underpinning the assembly of stable and complex ecosystems is a main focus of community ecology. Ecological theory predicts the necessity of structural constraints on the network of species interactions to allow for growth and persistence of multi-species communities. However, the mechanisms behind their emergence are not well understood. An understanding of how the coexistence of diverse species interaction types could influence the development of complexity and how a persistent composition of interactions could arise in nature is needed. Using an eco-evolutionary model, we investigate the assembly of complex species interaction networks with multiple interaction types and its consequences for ecosystem stability. Our results show that highly mutualistic communities promote complex and stable network configurations, thus resulting in a positive complexity-stability relationship. We show that evolution by speciation enhances the emergence of such conditions compared to a purely ecological assembly scenario of repeated invasions by migrating species. Furthermore, communities evolved in isolation promote a disproportionately higher complexity and a larger diversity of outcomes. Our results produce valuable theoretical insight into the mechanisms behind the emergence of ecological complexity and into the roles of mutualism and speciation in community formation.
揭示支撑稳定且复杂生态系统组装的生态和进化机制是群落生态学的主要关注点。生态理论预测，物种相互作用网络存在结构限制的必要性，以确保多物种群落的生长和存续。然而，这些限制出现背后的机制尚未得到充分理解。我们需要了解不同物种相互作用类型的共存如何影响复杂性的发展，以及自然界中如何出现持续的相互作用组合。通过一个生态进化模型，我们研究了具有多种相互作用类型的复杂物种相互作用网络的组装及其对生态系统稳定性的影响。我们的结果表明，高度互利的群落促进了复杂且稳定的网络结构，从而产生了正的复杂性-稳定性关系。我们表明，与仅由迁移物种反复入侵构成的纯生态组装情景相比，物种形成导致的进化增强了此类条件的出现。此外，孤立进化的群落促进了不成比例的更高复杂性和更多样化的结果。我们的结果为生态复杂性出现背后的机制以及互利共生和物种形成在群落形成中的作用提供了有价值的理论见解。
