Consequences of adaptive foraging in diverse communities

Summary

1. Selective pressures acting on foraging activities constrain the strength of interaction, hence the stability and energetic availability in food webs.

2. Because such selective pressures are usually measured at the individual level and because most experimental and theoretical works focus on simple settings, linking adaptive foraging with community scale patterns is still a far stretch.

3. Some recent models incorporate foraging adaptation in diverse communities. The models vary in the way they incorporate adaptation, via evolutionary or behavioural changes, and define individual fitness in various ways.

4. In spite of these differences, some general results linking adaptation to community structure and functioning emerge. In the present article, I introduce these different models and highlight their common results.

5. Adaptive foraging provides stability to large food web models and predicts successfully interaction patterns within food webs as well as other topological features such as food chain length.

6. The relationships between adaptive foraging and other structuring factors particularly depend on how well connected the local community is with surrounding communities (metacommunity aspect).