Biodiversity,habitat area,resource growth rate and interference competition |
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Authors: | Kuang Yang Fagan William F Loladze Irakli |
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Affiliation: | (1) Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-1804, USA;(2) Department of Biology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA;(3) Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544-1033, USA |
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Abstract: | For the majority of species, per capita growth rate correlates negatively with population density. Although the popular logistic
equation for the growth of a single species incorporates this intraspecific competition, multi-trophic models often ignore
self-limitation of the consumers. Instead, these models often assume that the predator-prey interactions are purely exploitative,
employing simple Lotka-Volterra forms in which consumer species lack intraspecific competition terms. Here we show that intraspecific
interference competition can account for the stable coexistence of many consumer species on a single resource in a homogeneous
environment. In addition, our work suggests a potential mechanism for field observations demonstrating that habitat area and
resource productivity strongly positively correlate to biodiversity. In the special case of a modified Lotka-Volterra model
describing multiple predators competing for a single resource, we present an ordering procedure that determines the deterministic
fate of each specific consumer. Moreover, we find that the growth rate of a resource species is proportional to the maximum
number of consumer species that resource can support. In the limiting case, when the resource growth rate is infinite, a model
with intraspecific interference reduces to the conventional Lotka-Volterra competition model where there can be an unlimited
number of coexisting consumers. This highlights the crucial role that resource growth rates may play in promoting coexistence
of consumer species. |
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