Intraspecific predator interference promotes biodiversity in ecosystems.

ABSTRACT: Explaining biodiversity is a fundamental issue in ecology. A long-standing puzzle lies in the paradox of the plankton: many species of plankton feeding on a limited variety of resources coexist, apparently flouting the competitive exclusion principle (CEP), which holds that the number of predator (consumer) species cannot exceed that of the resources at a steady state. Here, we present a mechanistic model and demonstrate that intraspecific interference among the consumers enables a plethora of consumer species to coexist at constant population densities with only one or a handful of resource species. This facilitated biodiversity is resistant to stochasticity, either with the stochastic simulation algorithm or individual-based modeling. Our model naturally explains the classical experiment

SUBMITTER: Kang J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11524584 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature