scholarly journals Ecological Character Displacement Destabilizes Food Webs

2021 ◽  
Vol 197 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-28
Author(s):  
Matthew A. Barbour
Keyword(s):  
Food Webs ◽  
Character Displacement ◽  
Ecological Character ◽  
Ecological Character Displacement

scholarly journals Ecological character displacement destabilizes food webs

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew A. Barbour
Keyword(s):  
Food Web ◽  
Food Webs ◽  
Phenotypic Diversity ◽  
Interaction Strength ◽  
Character Displacement ◽  
Shared Resources ◽  
Adaptive Process ◽  
Ecological Character ◽  
Ecological Character Displacement ◽  
Resource Interactions

AbstractEcological character displacement is an adaptive process that generally increases phenotypic diversity. Despite the fact that this diversification is due to an eco-evolutionary feedback between consumers competing for shared resources, its consequences for food-web dynamics have received little attention. Here, I study a model of two consumers competing for two shared resources to examine how character displacement in consumer attack rates affects resource abundances and the resilience of food webs to perturbations. I found that character displacement always strengthened consumer-resource interactions whenever consumers competed for resources that occurred in different habitats. This increase in interaction strength resulted in lower resource abundances and less resilient food webs. This occurred under different evolutionary tradeoffs and in both simple and more realistic foraging scenarios. Taken together, my results show that the adaptive process of character displacement may come with the ecological cost of decreasing food-web resilience.

Adaptive Diversification Due to Resource Competition in Asexual Models

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Doebeli
Keyword(s):  
Resource Selection ◽  
Evolutionary Dynamics ◽  
Resource Competition ◽  
Single Species ◽  
Character Displacement ◽  
Adaptive Diversification ◽  
Ecological Character ◽  
Ecological Character Displacement ◽  
Phenotypic Diversification ◽  
Established Species

This chapter focuses on evolutionary branching in niche position due to frequency-dependent competition. When the majority phenotype of a population is competing for one type of resource, selection may favor minority phenotypes that consume different types of resources, which could result in phenotypic differentiation and divergence. The idea of divergence due to competition is also the basis for the well-known concept of ecological character displacement, although here the focus is not so much on the origin of diversity arising in a single species, but rather on the evolutionary dynamics of existing diversity between different and already established species. Ecological character displacement embodies the possibility that competition between species can drive divergence in characters determining resource use. However, there are alternative evolutionary scenarios for phenotypic diversification. In the context of resource competition, one such alternative is that individuals diversify their diet by evolving a wider niche.

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