Community composition and consumer identity determine the effect of resource species diversity on rates of consumption

Narwani, Anita

doi:10.1890/10-0850.1

Cited by 24 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…This finding has been previously documented by Narwani & Mazumder [54], who studied the effects of resource species diversity on the clearance rates of cladoceran zooplankton species. In that study, despite consumer-specific effects of changing resource diversity, resource diversity generally reduced consumer consumption rates.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 80%

Biodiversity Increases the Productivity and Stability of Phytoplankton Communities

Corcoran

Boeing

2012

PLoS ONE

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Global biodiversity losses provide an immediate impetus to elucidate the relationships between biodiversity, productivity and stability. In this study, we quantified the effects of species richness and species combination on the productivity and stability of phytoplankton communities subject to predation by a single rotifer species. We also tested one mechanism of the insurance hypothesis: whether large, slow-growing, potentially-defended cells would compensate for the loss of small, fast-growing, poorly-defended cells after predation. There were significant effects of species richness and species combination on the productivity, relative yield, and stability of phytoplankton cultures, but the relative importance of species richness and combination varied with the response variables. Species combination drove patterns of productivity, whereas species richness was more important for stability. Polycultures containing the most productive single species, Dunaliella, were consistently the most productive. Yet, the most species rich cultures were the most stable, having low temporal variability in measures of biomass. Polycultures recovered from short-term negative grazing effects, but this recovery was not due to the compensation of large, slow-growing cells for the loss of small, fast-growing cells. Instead, polyculture recovery was the result of reduced rotifer grazing rates and persisting small species within the polycultures. Therefore, although an insurance effect in polycultures was found, this effect was indirect and unrelated to grazing tolerance. We hypothesize that diverse phytoplankton assemblages interfered with efficient rotifer grazing and that this “interference effect” facilitated the recovery of the most productive species, Dunaliella. In summary, we demonstrate that both species composition and species richness are important in driving patterns of productivity and stability, respectively, and that stability in biodiverse communities can result from an alteration in consumer functioning. Our findings underscore the importance of predator-prey dynamics in determining the relationships between biodiversity, productivity and stability in producer communities.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 80%

Biodiversity Increases the Productivity and Stability of Phytoplankton Communities

Corcoran

Boeing

2012

PLoS ONE

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“…Supporting this idea, the context‐dependence effect of Fox’s Price equation partition (2010) on population variances (which measures the changes in individual species’ variances between high‐ and low‐diversity communities) showed that the dominant species in polycultures 1 and 3 ( S. acutus and P. subcapitata , respectively) were more variable in polyculture than they were in monoculture (see Appendix S2b, Supporting information). Finally, earlier work has shown that in communities with multiple palatable resource species, D. pulex may have an elevated rate of consumption (Narwani & Mazumder 2010). This may have strengthened consumer–resource interactions, destabilizing temporal dynamics (McCann 2000; Rip et al.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…2011). Finally, trophic interaction strengths may actually increase with resource species diversity depending on community composition (Narwani & Mazumder 2010), and this can destabilize consumer–resource dynamics (McCann 2000, Rip et al. 2010).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bottom‐up effects of species diversity on the functioning and stability of food webs

Narwani¹

2012

Journal of Animal Ecology

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Summary1. The importance of species diversity for the stability of populations, communities and ecosystem functions is a central question in ecology. 2. Biodiversity experiments have shown that diversity can impact both the average and variability of stocks and rates at these levels of ecological organization in single trophic-level ecosystems. Whether these impacts hold in food webs and across trophic levels is still unclear. 3. We asked whether resource species diversity, community composition and consumer feeding selectivity in planktonic food webs impact the stability of resource or consumer populations, community biomass and ecosystem functions. We also tested the relative importance of resource diversity and community composition. 4. We found that resource diversity negatively affected resource population stability, but had no effect on consumer population stability, regardless of the consumer's feeding selectivity. Resource diversity had positive effects on most ecosystem functions and their stability, including primary production, resource biomass and particulate carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations. 5. Community composition, however, generally explained more variance in population, community and ecosystem properties than species diversity per se. This result points to the importance of the outcomes of particular species interactions and individual species' effect traits in determining food web properties and stability. 6. Among the stabilizing mechanisms tested, an increase in the average resource community biomass with increasing resource diversity had the greatest positive impact on stability. 7. Our results indicate that resource diversity and composition are generally important for the functioning and stability of whole food webs, but do not have straightforward impacts on consumer populations.

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“…Studies focusing on the combined effect of multiple predators with different resource utilization are unfortunately rare (Jiang and Morin, 2005;Diehl et al, 2013), but most likely better reflect natural communities and enable the direct observation of a major mediator of coexistence: resource partitioning (Chesson, 1991). Narwani and Mazumder (2010) showed that the overall consumption of specialist predators decreases at higher resource diversities, whereas generalist predators show an increase in consumption (Narwani and Mazumder, 2010). Species not directly involved in consumptive interactions are the key to survival of susceptible prey and increased persistence of prey species in more complex food webs (Hammill et al, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Generalist Protist Predator Enables Coexistence in Multitrophic Predator-Prey Systems Containing a Phage and the Bacterial Predator Bdellovibrio

et al. 2017

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Complex ecosystems harbor multiple predators and prey species whose direct and indirect interactions are under study. In particular, the combined effects of predator diversity and resource preference on prey removal are not known. To understand the effect of interspecies interactions, combinations of micro-predators-i.e., protists (generalists), predatory bacteria (semi-specialists), and phages (specialists)-and bacterial prey were tracked over a 72-h period in miniature membrane bioreactors. While specialist predators alone drove their preferred prey to extinction, the inclusion of a generalist resulted in uniform losses among prey species. Most importantly, presence of a generalist predator enabled coexistence of all predators and prey. As the generalist predator also negatively affected the other predators, we suggest that resource partitioning between predators and the constant availability of resources for bacterial growth due to protist predation stabilizes the system and keeps its diversity high. The appearance of resistant prey strains and subsequent evolution of specialist predators unable to infect the ancestral prey implies that multitrophic communities are able to persist and stabilize themselves. Interestingly, the appearance of BALOs and phages unable to infect their prey was only observed for the BALO or phage in the absence of additional predators or prey species indicating that competition between predators might influence coevolutionary dynamics.

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Community composition and consumer identity determine the effect of resource species diversity on rates of consumption

Cited by 24 publications

References 36 publications

Biodiversity Increases the Productivity and Stability of Phytoplankton Communities

Biodiversity Increases the Productivity and Stability of Phytoplankton Communities

Bottom‐up effects of species diversity on the functioning and stability of food webs

A Generalist Protist Predator Enables Coexistence in Multitrophic Predator-Prey Systems Containing a Phage and the Bacterial Predator Bdellovibrio

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