Food-web complexity emerging from ecological dynamics on adaptive networks

Abstract

Food webs are complex networks describing trophic interactions in ecological communities. Since Robert May’s seminal work on random structured food webs, the complexity–stability debate is a central issue in ecology: does network complexity increase or decrease food-web persistence? A multi-species predator–prey model incorporating adaptive predation shows that the action of ecological dynamics on the topology of a food web (whose initial configuration is generated either by the cascade model or by the niche model) render, when a significant fraction of adaptive predators is present, similar hyperbolic complexity–persistence relationships as those observed in empirical food webs. It is also shown that the apparent positive relation between complexity and persistence in food webs generated under the cascade model, which has been pointed out in previous papers, disappears when the final connectance is used instead of the initial one to explain species persistence.