Intransitivity as a dynamic assembly engine of competitive communities.

ABSTRACT: Historically, those ecological communities thought to be dominated by competitive interactions among their component species have been assumed to exhibit transitive competition, that is, a hierarchy of competitive strength from most dominant to most submissive. A surge of recent literature takes issue with this assumption and notes that some species in some communities are intransitive, where a rock/scissors/paper arrangement characterizes some components of some communities. We here propose a merging of these two ideas, wherein an intransitive subgroup of species connects with a distinct subcomponent that is organized hierarchically, such that the expected eventual takeover by the dominant competitor in the hierarchy is thwarted, and the entire community can be sustained. This means that

SUBMITTER: Vandermeer J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10104487 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature