Mutualism Destabilizes Communities, but Competition Pays the Price

Abstract

A classic result in theoretical ecology states that an increase in the proportion of mutualistic interactions in unstructured ecological communities leads to a loss of stability to external perturbations. However, the fate and composition of the species that constitute an unstable ecology community following such perturbations remains relatively unexplored. In this paper, we use an individual-based model to study the population dynamics of unstructured communities following external perturbations to population numbers. We find that while mutualistic interactions do indeed destabilize communities, the entire community is rarely wiped out following a perturbation. Instead, only a subset of the ecological community is driven to extinction, and the species that go extinct are more likely to be those engaged in a greater number of competitive interactions. Thus, the resultant community formed after a perturbation has a higher proportion of mutualistic interactions than the original community. We show that this result can be explained by studying the dynamics of the species engaged in the highest number of competitive interactions: After an external perturbation, those species that compete with such a ‘top competitor’ are more likely to go extinct than expected by chance alone, whereas those that are engaged in mutualistic interactions with such a species are less likely to go extinct than expected by chance alone. Our results provide a potential explanation for the ubiquity of mutualistic interactions in nature despite the known negative effects of mutualism on community stability.