What is it about?
A few studies on simple food chain suggest that competition has a strong dampening ability till some degrees and play a vital role to stabilize the food chain dynamics in the ecosystems. Still, much work is needed to understand the complex role played by competition in the food chains and food webs with higher trophic. We have studied the effect of competition on the (i) Combination of two food chain model and (ii) Combination of a food chain with a food web model, having individually various stability conditions (point stability and instability (or chaos)). In most of these cases, we have observed that low competition favors chaotic dynamics exhibited by one of the original models but as competition increases, system come into stability (limit cycles to point stability) and extinction of some species occurred as high competition is not favorable for the coexistence of species.
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Why is it important?
Food webs are woven by trophic interactions among the various species which regulate and maintain the population directly. Trophic interactions can control and balance the ecological traits including competition, mortality, spatial movements, community composition, species richness and biodiversity in the ecosystem. Also from our various combinations of model dynamics, we have observed a negative effect of competition on the stable systems as high competition brings point stability to oscillations with higher trophic species extinction. The threshold values of the competition for each models may vary with original model’s stability conditions. With competition in these models, a bigger parameter stability domain is observed which increases along with competition (below to upper threshold). Such bigger stability domain enhances the species coexistence and reduces the probability of extinction as system has high probability to have stable solutions and far away from the extinction. Based on our observations, we hypothesize that competition may sustain coexistence and support biodiversity of the ecosystem. This study will help people to make understanding on competition in food web system.
Perspectives
The understanding of the coexistence of competing species on a limited number of resources in the ecosystem is the most difficult and challenging task for ecologists. This study was great exposure to me to understand the dynamics of the food web system as a mathematician. We believe that such food web models are essential to analyze as these are very often found in the case of forest (Plant communities) and many other pelagic aquatic systems.
Dr. Avinita Gautam
CNR, Rome, Italy
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Competition enhances coexistence and support biodiversity, January 2020, American Institute of Physics,
DOI: 10.1063/5.0018929.
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