Intraspecific predator interference promotes biodiversity in ecosystems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a mechanistic model showing that intraspecific predator interference can enable many consumer species to coexist with few resources, explaining biodiversity patterns and resolving the paradox of the plankton.

Contribution

The study presents a novel model demonstrating how intraspecific interference among consumers promotes biodiversity, challenging the traditional competitive exclusion principle.

Findings

Intraspecific interference allows coexistence of many consumer species with limited resources.

The model explains classical experiments invalidating the CEP.

Results are robust to stochasticity and individual-based modeling.

Abstract

Explaining biodiversity is a fundamental issue in ecology. A long-standing puzzle lies in the paradox of the plankton: many species of plankton feeding on a limited variety of resources coexist, apparently flouting the competitive exclusion principle (CEP), which holds that the number of predator (consumer) species cannot exceed that of the resources at a steady state. Here, we present a mechanistic model and demonstrate that intraspecific interference among the consumers enables a plethora of consumer species to coexist at constant population densities with only one or a handful of resource species. This facilitated biodiversity is resistant to stochasticity, either with the stochastic simulation algorithm or individual-based modeling. Our model naturally explains the classical experiments that invalidate the CEP, quantitatively illustrates the universal S-shaped pattern of the rank-abundance curves across a wide range of ecological communities, and can be broadly used to resolve the mystery of biodiversity in many natural ecosystems.