Complex Food Webs: The Role of Parasites

TL;DRAbstract

Parasites are vital aspects of an ecosystem, and yet have only recently begun to be included in theoretical studies of food webs. There are numerous reasons for this neglect, but recent interest has arisen in remedying the situation. Key to the addition of parasites are various structural features that ecological networks display, and the mechanisms behind them. We look at two of these features, nestedness and downward asymmetry, and describe mathematically the forces that create them. We discover from the basic reproductive ratio that population dynamics are insufficient to drive nested and anti-nested patterns in host-parasite networks, and instead we demonstrate the manner in which adaptive dynamics may be used to explain patterns through the coevolution of species interaction traits. We use the same technique in a mutualistic network in order to compare results. Following this, we use the basic reproductive ratio to demonstrate how the population dynamics of infectious systems prom

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