Adaptive foraging does not always lead to more complex food webs

0345443 - BC 2011 RIV GB eng J - Journal Article
Berec, Luděk - Eisner, J. - Křivan, Vlastimil
Adaptive foraging does not always lead to more complex food webs.
Journal of Theoretical Biology. Roč. 266, č. 2 (2010), s. 211-218. ISSN 0022-5193. E-ISSN 1095-8541
R&D Projects: GA AV ČR IAA100070601
Institutional research plan: CEZ:AV0Z50070508
Keywords : diet choice * population dynamics * niche model
Subject RIV: EH - Ecology, Behaviour
Impact factor: 2.371, year: 2010

Recent modeling studies suggest that adaptivity in foraging decisions of consumers makes food webs more complex. Models these studies are based on share two features: parameters are chosen uniformly for all species and adaptive foraging is described by the search image model. We relax these assumptions: we allow parameters to vary among the species and use the diet choice model as an alternative model of adaptive foraging. We show that (i) for species-independent parameter values for which the search image model demonstrates a significant effect of adaptive foraging on food web complexity, the diet choice model produces no such effect; (ii) the effect of adaptive foraging through the search image model attenuates when parameter values are not species-independent; and (iii) for the diet choice model we observe no effect of adaptive foraging on food web complexity. All these observations suggest that adaptive foraging does not always lead to more complex food webs.
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0186716