Print PageScientists tend to ignore individual variation and stage-structure when examining community dynamics. However, communities are known to vary across ecosystems over changing conditions. Communities can also vary over time due to factors such as fluctuations in prey abundance and climate change. If the community is able to respond to these changes, this would result in a flexible food web that changes shape over time. It is unclear whether this adaptability would be more or less stable than the classic food web. Here, using existing data, we first show empirically that food webs do indeed change. We then use these changes to motivate a relatively simple stage-structured food web module which allows us to explore the dynamical implications of these flexible food webs through the adaptive feeding behaviour of the top predator.
Results/Conclusions
Our results suggest that, under certain conditions, the adaptive capacity, allowed by differential stage-structured responses to changes in prey densities, can be an important stabilizing factor. This stabilizing potential is highly dependent on predation intensity and speed of the stage-structured response to changes in prey density.
