ArticleScientific reports2021
Strange invaders increase disturbance and promote generalists in an evolving food web.
Article in Scientific reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Generalist vs. specialist: cognition and behavioral flexibility in Gambusia across habitats.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Mutualism provides a basis for biodiversity in eco-evolutionary community assembly.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- The role of intra-guild indirect interactions in assembling plant-pollinator networks.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Energetic connectivity of diverse elasmobranch populations - implications for ecological resilience.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The patterns of diet specialization in food webs determine community structure, stability, and function. While specialists are often thought to evolve due to greater efficiency, generalists should have an advantage in systems with high levels of variability. Here we test the generalist-disturbance hypothesis using a dynamic, evolutionary food web model. Species occur along a body size axis with three traits (body size, feeding center, feeding range) that evolve independently and determine interaction strengths. Communities are assembled via ecological and evolutionary processes, where species biomass and persistence are driven by a bioenergetics model. New species are introduced either as mutants similar to parent species in the community or as invaders, with dissimilar traits. We introduced variation into communities by increasing the dissimilarity of invading species across simulations. We found that strange invaders increased the variability of communities which increased both the degree of generalism and the relative persistence of generalist species, indicating that invasion disturbance promotes the evolution of generalist species in food webs.
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