Biodiversity, Habitat Area, Resource Growth Rate and Interference Competition
✍ Scribed by Yang Kuang; William F. Fagan; Irakli Loladze
- Book ID
- 104271835
- Publisher
- Springer
- Year
- 2003
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 265 KB
- Volume
- 65
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1522-9602
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
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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