Interspecific competition underlying mutualistic networks.

ABSTRACT

Multiple classes of interactions may exist affecting one another in a given system. For the mutualistic networks of plants and pollinating animals, it has been known that the degree distribution is broad but often deviates from power-law form more significantly for plants than animals. To illuminate the origin of such asymmetry, we study a model network in which links are assigned under generalized preferential-selection rules between two groups of nodes and find the sensitive dependence of the resulting connectivity pattern on the model parameters. The nonlinearity of preferential selection can come from interspecific interactions among animals and among plants. The model-based analysis of real-world mutualistic networks suggests that a new animal determines its partners not only by their abundance but also under the competition with existing animal species, which leads to the stretched-exponential degree distributions of plants.