TY - JOUR
T1 - Competitive coexistence through intermediate polyphagy
AU - Vandermeer, John
AU - Pascual, Mercedes
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Lord Robert May, M.A. Evans, S. Levin, and K. McCann for reading earlier versions of the manuscript. This work was supported in part by a grant from the US National Science Foundation.
PY - 2006/3
Y1 - 2006/3
N2 - Communities containing species that are not niche differentiated require some mechanism to avoid the expected competitive exclusion of all but one or a few species. Predator pressure has long been held to be one of those mechanisms. Here, we show that the critical feature of predation is not its intensity, but its degree of specialization. Neither highly specialist nor highly generalist predators are effective at deterring competitive exclusion, but rather predators that exhibit an intermediate level of polyphagy can effectively provide such a mechanism.
AB - Communities containing species that are not niche differentiated require some mechanism to avoid the expected competitive exclusion of all but one or a few species. Predator pressure has long been held to be one of those mechanisms. Here, we show that the critical feature of predation is not its intensity, but its degree of specialization. Neither highly specialist nor highly generalist predators are effective at deterring competitive exclusion, but rather predators that exhibit an intermediate level of polyphagy can effectively provide such a mechanism.
KW - Competitive coexistence
KW - Intermediate polyphagy
KW - Predator pressure
KW - Specialization
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=32444442304&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=32444442304&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.ecocom.2005.05.005
DO - 10.1016/j.ecocom.2005.05.005
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:32444442304
SN - 1476-945X
VL - 3
SP - 37
EP - 43
JO - Ecological Complexity
JF - Ecological Complexity
IS - 1
ER -