When cheating turns into a stabilizing mechanism of plant-pollinator communities.

ABSTRACT: Mutualistic interactions, such as plant-mycorrhizal or plant-pollinator interactions, are widespread in ecological communities and frequently exploited by cheaters, species that profit from interactions without providing benefits in return. Cheating usually negatively affects the fitness of the individuals that are cheated on, but the effects of cheating at the community level remains poorly understood. Here, we describe 2 different kinds of cheating in mutualistic networks and use a generalized Lotka-Volterra model to show that they have very different consequences for the persistence of the community. Conservative cheating, where a species cheats on its mutualistic partners to escape the cost of mutualistic interactions, negatively affects community persistence. In contrast, innovative c

SUBMITTER: Duchenne F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10752559 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature