Less is worse than none: ineffective adaptive foraging can destabilise food webs

Consumers can potentially adjust their diet in response to changing resource abundances, thereby achieving better foraging payoffs. Although previous work has explored how such adaptive foraging scales up to determine the structure and dynamics of food webs, consumers may not be able to perform perfect diet adjustment due to sensory or cognitive limitations. Whether the effectiveness of consumers' diet adjustment alters food-web consequences remains unclear. Here, we study how adaptive foraging, specifically the effectiveness (i.e. rate) with which consumers adjust their diet, influences the structure, dynamics, and overall species persistence in synthetic food webs. We model metabolically-constrained optimal foraging as the mechanistic basis of adaptive diet adjustment and ensuing population dynamics within food webs. We compare food-web dynamical outcomes among simulations sharing initial states but differing in the effectiveness of diet adjustment. We show that adaptive diet adjustment generally makes food-web structure resilient to species loss. Effective diet adjustment that maintains optimal foraging in the face of changing resource abundances facilitates species persistence in the community, particularly reducing the extinction of top consumers. However, a greater proportion of intermediate consumers goes extinct as optimal foraging becomes less-effective and, unexpectedly, slow diet adjustment leads to higher extinction rates than no diet adjustment at all. Therefore, food-web responses cannot be predicted from species' responses in isolation, as even less-effective adaptive foraging benefits individual species (better than non-adaptive) but can harm species' persistence in the food web as a whole (worse than non-adaptive). Whether adaptive foraging helps or harms species coexistence has been contradictory in literature. Our finding that it can stabilise or destabilise the food web depending on how effectively it is performed help reconcile this conflict. Inspired by our simulations, we deduce that there may exist a positive association between consumers' body size and adaptive-foraging effectiveness in the real world. We also infer that such effectiveness may be higher when consumers cognise complete information about their resources, or when trophic interactions are driven more by general traits than by specific trait-matching. We thereby suggest testable hypotheses on species persistence and food-web structure for future research, in both theoretical and empirical systems.

Selective predators and responsive prey

Predators feed on a variety of prey and this has important consequences for both predator and prey. This chapter introduces optimal foraging theory as a way to understand why predators prefer some prey types over others and discusses the evidence for adaptive diet choice in nature. Simple optimality models are used to understand how predators make decisions about where to feed (habitat choice) and how long to stay in a prey patch (“giving-up-time”). The non-lethal or non-consumptive effects of predators can be as important as their direct lethal effects. Discussed are examples of how prey respond to the threat of predation (the “ecology of fear”) by changing their behaviors, morphologies, physiologies, and life histories. The chapter concludes with an examination of the relative importance of predator consumptive and non-consumptive effects.

Evidence for adaptive diet-induced thermogenesis in man during intravenous nutrition with hypertonic glucose

1. This study was designed to investigate the thermogenic effect of intravenously administered nutrition with glucose (given with a fixed nitrogen intake of 12.5 g daily as amino acids) as the principal source of energy. The protocol was designed so that each patient received their energy intake in five consecutive periods of 3 days with intakes ranging from 6650 to 17100 kJ/day with increments or decrements of 2600 kJ. 2. Thermogenesis from administered glucose was evident between levels of energy supply of 6650 kJ/day and 17100 kJ/day. The progressive rise in oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production accounted for a total of 31% of the additional glucose which was administered. The net rate of fat synthesis from glucose reached a maximum 147 g/day at an energy supply of 14 500 kJ/day. 3. This study suggests that both fat synthesis and the associated obligatory thermogenesis is the main component of diet-induced thermogenesis in response to glucose intakes in excess of 150 kJ day−1 kg−1. If the energy cost of fat synthesis (fat associated obligatory thermogenesis) is taken to be 22% of the total energy of the increase in glucose supplied, then only 9% (31–22%) of the glucose can be accounted for by adaptive thermogenesis.