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Mechanisms for consumer diversity

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Abstract

Arising from: W. A. Nelson, E. McCauley & F. J. Wrona Nature 433, 413–417 (2005)10.1038/nature03212; Nelson et al. reply.

A variety of mechanisms can theoretically produce competitive coexistence in nature1, making it hard to identify a single explanation for the maintenance of diversity in any particular system. Based on laboratory experiments with a consumer–resource system of crustacean Daphnia eating algae, Nelson et al.2 suggest that maintenance of genetic diversity in the consumer populations they studied depends only on the dynamics of the population structure of the consumer. We suggest that the differences in Daphnia genetic diversity that they find for different experimental treatments could equally be explained by a simple, well known mechanism: the number of coexisting competitors cannot exceed the number of shared resources3,4,5. Here we confirm this possibility by using a simple mathematical model and suggest that more than one mechanism may account for the maintenance of genetic diversity observed by Nelson et al. in their system.

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Figure 1: Effects of resource diversity on maintenance of consumer genetic diversity.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, 14853-2701, New York, USA

    Takehito Yoshida, Laura E. Jones, Stephen P. Ellner & Nelson G. Hairston Jr

Authors
  1. Takehito Yoshida
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  2. Laura E. Jones
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  3. Stephen P. Ellner
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  4. Nelson G. Hairston Jr
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Correspondence to Takehito Yoshida.

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Yoshida, T., Jones, L., Ellner, S. et al. Mechanisms for consumer diversity. Nature 439, E1–E2 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature04526

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