Interspecific information use facilitates species coexistence in ecosystems

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that interspecific social information use among predators can relax competitive exclusion constraints, explaining high biodiversity and coexistence in ecosystems beyond traditional ecological limits.

Contribution

It introduces a novel predation model incorporating interspecific information use, providing a mechanism for species coexistence beyond the competitive exclusion principle.

Findings

Model reproduces classical experiments contradicting CEP

Explains coexistence patterns in natural ecosystems

Provides a general mechanism for biodiversity maintenance

Abstract

Explaining how competing species coexist remains a central question in ecology. The well-known competitive exclusion principle (CEP) states that two species competing for the same resource cannot stably coexist, and more generally, that the number of consumer species is bounded by the number of resource species at steady state. However, the remarkable species diversity observed in natural ecosystems, exemplified by the paradox of the plankton, challenges this principle. Here, we show that interspecific social information use among predators provides a mechanism that fundamentally relaxes the constraints of competitive exclusion. A model of predation dynamics that incorporates interspecific information use naturally explains coexistence beyond the limits imposed by CEP. Our model quantitatively reproduces two classical experiments that contradicts the CEP and captures coexistence patterns documented in natural ecosystems, offering a general mechanism for the maintenance of biodiversity in ecological communities.