Imperial College London
Alternate

Samraat Pawar

Faculty of Natural Sciences, Department of Life Sciences (Silwood Park)

Professor of Theoretical Ecology
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 2213s.pawar CV

 
 
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Location

 

2.4KennedySilwood Park

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Ho:2021:10.1101/2021.11.28.470273,
author = {Ho, H-C and Pawar, S and Tylianakis, JM},
doi = {10.1101/2021.11.28.470273},
title = {Less is worse than none: ineffective adaptive foraging can destabilise food webs},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/2021.11.28.470273},
year = {2021}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - <jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p><jats:list list-type="order"><jats:list-item><jats:p>Consumers can potentially adjust their diet in response to changing resource abundances, thereby achieving better foraging payoffs. Although previous work has explored how such adaptive foraging scales up to determine the structure and dynamics of food webs, consumers may not be able to perform perfect diet adjustment due to sensory or cognitive limitations. Whether the effectiveness of consumers’ diet adjustment alters food-web consequences remains unclear.</jats:p></jats:list-item><jats:list-item><jats:p>Here, we study how adaptive foraging, specifically the effectiveness (i.e. rate) with which consumers adjust their diet, influences the structure, dynamics, and overall species persistence in synthetic food webs.</jats:p></jats:list-item><jats:list-item><jats:p>We model metabolically-constrained optimal foraging as the mechanistic basis of adaptive diet adjustment and ensuing population dynamics within food webs. We compare food-web dynamical outcomes among simulations sharing initial states but differing in the effectiveness of diet adjustment.</jats:p></jats:list-item><jats:list-item><jats:p>We show that adaptive diet adjustment generally makes food-web structure resilient to species loss. Effective diet adjustment that maintains optimal foraging in the face of changing resource abundances facilitates species persistence in the community, particularly reducing the extinction of top consumers. However, a greater proportion of intermediate consumers goes extinct as optimal foraging becomes less-effective and, unexpectedly, slow diet adjustment leads to higher extinction rates than no diet adjustment at all. Therefore, food-web responses cannot be predicted from species’ responses in isolation, as even less-effective adaptive foraging benefits i
AU  - Ho,H-C
AU  - Pawar,S
AU  - Tylianakis,JM
DO  - 10.1101/2021.11.28.470273
PY  - 2021///
TI  - Less is worse than none: ineffective adaptive foraging can destabilise food webs
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/2021.11.28.470273
ER  -
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