# Plant coexistence mediated by adaptive foraging preferences of exploiters or mutualists

## TL;DR

This paper models how adaptive animal preferences for plants, whether as exploiters or mutualists, influence plant coexistence, revealing that behavioral adaptations can promote coexistence under various competitive scenarios.

## Contribution

It introduces a new modeling approach using generalized isoclines to analyze behaviorally-mediated plant-animal interactions and their effects on plant coexistence.

## Key findings

- Adaptive animal preferences can lead to multiple plant coexistence outcomes.
- Exploiter generalism promotes coexistence even under strong competition.
- Mutualist specialization supports coexistence at stable states when competition is weak.

## Abstract

Coexistence of plants depends on their competition for common resources and indirect interactions mediated by shared exploiters or mutualists. These interactions are driven either by changes in animal abundance (density-mediated interactions, e.g., apparent competition), or by changes in animal preferences for plants (behaviorally-mediated interactions). This article studies effects of behaviorally-mediated interactions on two plant population dynamics and animal preference dynamics when animal densities are fixed. Animals can be either adaptive exploiters or adaptive mutualists (e.g., herbivores or pollinators) that maximize their fitness. Analysis of the model shows that adaptive animal preferences for plants can lead to multiple outcomes of plant coexistence with different levels of specialization or generalism for the mediator animal species. In particular, exploiter generalism promotes plant coexistence even when inter-specific competition is too strong to make plant coexistence possible without exploiters, and mutualist specialization promotes plant coexistence at alternative stable states when plant inter-specific competition is weak. Introducing a new concept of generalized isoclines allows us to fully analyze the model with respect to the strength of competitive interactions between plants (weak or strong), and the type of interaction between plants and animals (exploitation or mutualism). Keywords: behaviorally-mediated interactions, competition for preference, differential inclusion, generalized isocline, switching, sliding and repelling regimes.