Higher-order species interactions cause time-dependent niche and fitness differences: Experimental evidence in plant-feeding arthropods.

Autor: Majer A; Population Ecology Lab, Faculty of Biology, Institute of Environmental Biology, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland.; Center for Advanced Technology, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland., Skoracka A; Population Ecology Lab, Faculty of Biology, Institute of Environmental Biology, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland., Spaak J; Institute for Environmental Sciences, RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau, Landau, Germany., Kuczyński L; Population Ecology Lab, Faculty of Biology, Institute of Environmental Biology, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Ecology letters [Ecol Lett] 2024 May; Vol. 27 (5), pp. e14428.
DOI: 10.1111/ele.14428
Abstrakt: Species interact in different ways, including competition, facilitation and predation. These interactions can be non-linear or higher order and may depend on time or species densities. Although these higher-order interactions are virtually ubiquitous, they remain poorly understood, as they are challenging both theoretically and empirically. We propose to adapt niche and fitness differences from modern coexistence theory and apply them to species interactions over time. As such, they may not merely inform about coexistence, but provide a deeper understanding of how species interactions change. Here, we investigated how the exploitation of a biotic resource (plant) by phytophagous arthropods affects their interactions. We performed monoculture and competition experiments to fit a generalized additive mixed model to the empirical data, which allowed us to calculate niche and fitness differences. We found that species switch between different types of interactions over time, including intra- and interspecific facilitation, and strong and weak competition.
(© 2024 The Authors. Ecology Letters published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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