The double-edged sword of inducible defences: costs and benefits of maladaptive switching from the individual to the community level.

ABSTRACT: Phenotypic plasticity can increase individual fitness when environmental conditions change over time. Inducible defences are a striking example, allowing species to react to fluctuating predation pressure by only expressing their costly defended phenotype under high predation risk. Previous theoretical investigations have focused on how this affects predator-prey dynamics, but the impact on competitive outcomes and broader community dynamics has received less attention. Here we use a small food web model, consisting of two competing plastic autotrophic species exploited by a shared consumer, to study how the speed of inducible defences across three trade-off constellations affects autotroph coexistence, biomasses across trophic levels, and temporal variability. Contrary to the intuitive id

SUBMITTER: Kath NJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9209413 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature