Does predator interference cause alternative stable states in multispecies communities?

quantifying resilience in ecology and evolution under global environmental change

Does predator interference cause alternative stable states in multispecies communities?

July 8, 2012 latest news 0

Our paper with Jiangfeng Feng and Egbert van Nes in Theoretical Population Biology just appeared online http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tpb.2012.06.003 . We show that predator interference has a dual effect on the dynamics of multispecies predator prey communities: on one hand it increases their dynamical stability (in the sense of leading to stable equilibrium dynamics), while on the other hand it decreases their resilience (in the sense of increasing the number of alternative stable states that these communities may end to).