RESUMO
We investigate the stability of a diamond food-web module on two patches coupled by migration in terms of robustness, which is the proportion of surviving species in the system. The parameters are chosen such that the dynamics on an isolated patch have a periodic attractor with all four species present as well as an attractor where the prey that is preferred by the top predator dies out. The migration rate and the migration bias between the two patches are varied, resulting in a surprisingly complex relation between migration rate and robustness. In particular, while the degree of synchronization usually increases with increasing migration rate, robustness can increase as well as decrease. We find that the main results also hold when the number of patches is larger. Different types of connectivity patterns between patches can lead to different extent of migration bias if the migration rate out of each patch is the same.
Assuntos
Migração Animal/fisiologia , Cadeia Alimentar , Modelos Biológicos , AnimaisRESUMO
We investigate the relation between complexity and stability in model food webs by evaluating the local stability of fixed points of the population dynamics using the recently developed method of generalized modeling. We first determine general conditions that lead to positive complexity-stability relations. These include (1) high resource abundance and (2) strong density-dependent mortality effects that limit consumer populations. The parameters that constitute a generalized model have clear biological meanings. In this work, emphasis is placed on using realistic values for these generalized parameters. They are derived from conventional ordinary differential equations which are commonly used to describe population dynamics and for which empirical parameter estimates exist. We find that the empirically supported generalized parameters fall in regions of the parameter space that allow for a positive relation between food-web complexity and stability.
