Coupling strength between omnivory loops and their one-species-delete
subloops drives food web stability
Abstract
A central and fundamental issue in ecology is to understand the
relationship between complexity and stability. Increased empirical
evidences demonstrated no clear relationships between complexity metrics
and stability, and recent food web loop analyses suggested that maximum
loop weight as well as the summation ratio between 3 and 2-link feedback
loop weights could be better estimators of system stability. However,
the importance of longer loops than 3-link on the stability remains
unclear. Here we use 127 marine food webs and the matrix product and
trace method to investigate the relationship between loops with maximum
of 7 links and food web stability. We found that feedback metrics
|a2n+1/a2n|α, i.e., the ratio of the sums of (2n +
1)-link and 2n-link loop weights, are strongly related with stability.
These sum weight ratios can be regarded as the coupling strength between
omnivory loops and their one-species-delete subloops, including the
smallest three species and high-level omnivory ones. Further theoretical
simulations of bioenergetic consumer-resource models with allometric
constraints strengthen this finding. These results suggest that both
longer loops and omnivory are important drivers of the food web
stability.