Instruct: Identify the main category of Biorxiv papers based on the titles and abstracts
Query: Body size dependent dispersal influences stability in heterogeneous metacommunities Body size affects key biological processes across the tree of life, with particular importance for food web dynamics and stability. Traits influencing movement capabilities depend strongly on body size, yet the effects of allometrically-structured dispersal on food web stability are less well understood than other demographic processes. Here we study the stability properties of spatially-arranged model food webs in which larger bodied species occupy higher trophic positions, while species body sizes also determine the rates at which they traverse spatial networks of heterogeneous habitat patches. Our analysis shows an apparent stabilizing effect of positive dispersal rate scaling with body size compared to negative scaling relationships or uniform dispersal. However, as the global coupling strength among patches increases, the benefits of positive body size-dispersal scaling disappear. A permutational analysis shows that breaking allometric dispersal hierarchies while preserving dispersal rate distributions rarely alters qualitative aspects of metacommunity stability. Taken together, these results suggest that the oft-predicted stabilizing effects of large mobile predators may, for some dimensions of ecological stability, be attributed to increased patch coupling per se, and not necessarily coupling by top trophic levels in particular.
1
The categories of this paper are: bioinformatics
10
The categories of this paper are: and
12
The categories of this paper are: behavior
8
The categories of this paper are: genomics
4
The categories of this paper are: neuroscience
22
The categories of this paper are: physiology
0
The categories of this paper are: genetics
15
The categories of this paper are: developmental
32
The categories of this paper are: zoology
28
The categories of this paper are: communication
16
The categories of this paper are: microbiology
25
The categories of this paper are: bioengineering
3
The categories of this paper are: evolutionary
29
The categories of this paper are: education
2
The categories of this paper are: biology
27
The categories of this paper are: pathology