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Article Dans Une Revue Functional Ecology Année : 2019

From apparent competition to facilitation, impacts of consumer niche construction on the coexistence and stability of consumer‐resource communities

Résumé

In addition to their direct trophic effects, some consumers have a positive indirect effect on their resource, due to niche construction. A predator can facilitate its prey resource acquisition, through prey transport, or through modifications of nutrient cycling. Alternatively, a predator may defend its prey against other predators, or actively manage it, as in agriculture, which is found in numerous taxa such as humans, ants, beetles, fishes and microbes. Here, we investigate the ecological consequences of considering such positive effects in a simple two-resource–one-consumer module, in which the consumer has a positive effect on one of the resources. We consider several scenarios, in which the positive effect on the resource is either not costly, that is resulting from a by-product of the consumer phenotype such as nutrient cycling, or costly. The cost either decreases the exploitation of the cultivated resource or the opportunity to forage the alternative resource. We investigate how the intensity of niche construction impacts species coexistence, the distribution of biomass among the three species and the stability of the community. We show that by modifying the trophic interactions in the module, niche construction alters the apparent competition between the resources, thereby impacting their coexistence. When niche construction has little or no cost to the consumer, it leads to higher consumer and cultivated resource densities, while decreasing the alternative resource density. Alternatively, when niche construction has higher costs, the alternative resource can increase in density, niche construction thereby leading to the emergence of facilitative interactions among resource species
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Dates et versions

hal-02174329 , version 1 (08-12-2023)

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Aurore Picot, Thibaud Monnin, Nicolas Loeuille. From apparent competition to facilitation, impacts of consumer niche construction on the coexistence and stability of consumer‐resource communities. Functional Ecology, 2019, 33 (9), pp.1746-1757. ⟨10.1111/1365-2435.13378⟩. ⟨hal-02174329⟩
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