Keep the bees off the trees: The particular vulnerability of species in the periphery of mutualistic networks to shock perturbations

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Halekotte, Lukas, Vanselow, Anna, Feudel, Ulrike
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Halekotte, Lukas
Vanselow, Anna
Feudel, Ulrike
author_facet Halekotte, Lukas
Vanselow, Anna
Feudel, Ulrike
contents We study the phenomenon of multistability in mutualistic networks of plants and pollinators, where one desired state in which all species coexist competes with multiple states in which some species are gone extinct. In this setting, we examine the relation between the endangerment of pollinator species and their position within the mutualistic network. To this end, we compare endangerment rankings which are derived from the species' probabilities of going extinct due to random shock perturbations with rankings obtained from different network theoretic centrality metrics. We find that a pollinator's endangerment is strongly linked to its degree of mutualistic specialization and its position within the core-periphery structure of its mutualistic network, with the most endangered species being specialists in the outer periphery. Since particularly well established instances of such peripheral areas are tree-shaped structures which stem from links between nodes/species in the outermost shell of the network, we summarized our findings in the admittedly ambiguous slogan 'keep the bees off the trees'. Finally, we challenge the generality of our findings by testing whether the title of this work still applies when being located in the outer periphery allows pollinators to avoid competitive pressure.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_02085
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Keep the bees off the trees: The particular vulnerability of species in the periphery of mutualistic networks to shock perturbations
Halekotte, Lukas
Vanselow, Anna
Feudel, Ulrike
Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems
We study the phenomenon of multistability in mutualistic networks of plants and pollinators, where one desired state in which all species coexist competes with multiple states in which some species are gone extinct. In this setting, we examine the relation between the endangerment of pollinator species and their position within the mutualistic network. To this end, we compare endangerment rankings which are derived from the species' probabilities of going extinct due to random shock perturbations with rankings obtained from different network theoretic centrality metrics. We find that a pollinator's endangerment is strongly linked to its degree of mutualistic specialization and its position within the core-periphery structure of its mutualistic network, with the most endangered species being specialists in the outer periphery. Since particularly well established instances of such peripheral areas are tree-shaped structures which stem from links between nodes/species in the outermost shell of the network, we summarized our findings in the admittedly ambiguous slogan 'keep the bees off the trees'. Finally, we challenge the generality of our findings by testing whether the title of this work still applies when being located in the outer periphery allows pollinators to avoid competitive pressure.
title Keep the bees off the trees: The particular vulnerability of species in the periphery of mutualistic networks to shock perturbations
topic Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.02085