Persistence of tri‐trophic interactions in seasonal environments

Abstract

Interactions between multiple trophic levels (e.g. resource, consumer, predator) are ubiquitous in all communities. The majority of such interactions involves ectotherms (microbes, plants, invertebrates, fish, amphibians and reptiles) whose body temperature is directly affected by the environmental temperature. Increasing evidence of climate warming has spurred a body of theory on temperature effects on species interactions (Amarasekare & Coutinho, 2014;

Temperature, productivity, and habitat characteristics collectively drive lake food web structure

“…This result contradicts previous studies showing that a more stable climate may favor longer food chains and narrower food niches (Carscadden et al, 2020; Ruiz‐Cooley et al, 2017). Nevertheless, a positive relationship between temperature variation and the vertical structure has already been reported for tetrapod food webs at the European scale (Braga et al, 2019), and some studies have predicted that ectotherm food chain lengths should increase with increasing latitude because larger‐amplitude seasonal fluctuations generate more opportunities for species to diverge in their thermal optima (Casas Goncalves & Amarasekare, 2021). We, thus, need to improve our understanding about the consequences of temperature variation (i.e., intra‐annual and inter‐annual) for food webs, especially since such variations may alter the stability and thresholds for collapse of interacting species and because this may be one of the major consequences of climate change on lake communities (Dee et al, 2020).…”

A framework for understanding climate change impacts through non‐compensatory intra‐ and interspecific climate change responses

“…(3) the optimal situation for one species (also known as a 'match') may often be to have a 'mismatch' in terms of, say, thermal optima (Casas Goncalves & Amarasekare, 2021;Smith & Amarasekare, 2018). If differences in climate change responses lead to downstream effects, we believe that non-compensatory effect is a much better description.…”