Connecting higher‐order interactions with ecological stability in experimental aquatic food webs
Citations Over TimeTop 10% of 2023 papers
Abstract
Community ecology is built on theories that represent the strength of interactions between species as pairwise links. Higher-order interactions (HOIs) occur when a species changes the pairwise interaction between a focal pair. Recent theoretical work has highlighted the stabilizing role of HOIs for large, simulated communities, yet it remains unclear how important higher-order effects are in real communities. Here, we used experimental communities of aquatic protists to examine the relationship between HOIs and stability (as measured by the persistence of a species in a community). We cultured a focal pair of consumers in the presence of additional competitors and a predator and collected time series data of their abundances. We then fitted competition models with and without HOIs to measure interaction strength between the focal pair across different community compositions. We used survival analysis to measure the persistence of individual species. We found evidence that additional species positively affected persistence of the focal species and that HOIs were present in most of our communities. However, persistence was only linked to HOIs for one of the focal species. Our results vindicate community ecology theory positing that species interactions may deviate from assumptions of pairwise interactions, opening avenues to consider possible consequences for coexistence and stability.
Related Papers
- → Artifacts or Attributes? Effects of Resolution on the Little Rock Lake Food Web(1991)705 cited
- → Food-web stability signals critical transitions in temperate shallow lakes(2015)145 cited
- → The influence of fluctuating ramping rates on the food web of boreal rivers(2008)47 cited
- → Size-based food web characteristics govern the response to species extinctions(2011)29 cited
- → Typical scaled food web structure and total mercury enrichment characteristics in Xingkai Lake, China(2022)8 cited