Abstract
Nowadays, most ecologists agree that competition and exploitation might be prevailing in nature, but since they act in the opposite directions, they produce surprisingly balanced food webs where elimination of species becomes highly unlikely. In other words, it turned out quite unexpectedly that negative interspecific relations play a positive regulatory role by supporting species diversity, rather than reducing it. There are reasons to believe that species diversity at a lower trophic level is maintained by the ‘top-down’ impact produced by the next higher trophic level (‘exploiter-mediated coexistence’). This positive effect, however, is only observed in communities that have undergone a certain period of coadaptation.
It is not completely clear, whether parasites can affect the diversity of their hosts in a similar way, although many ecologists are positive about that. However, contrary to herbivores and predators, parasites are much more specialised in terms of feeding and seldom can easily switch from one food source to another.
Basically, there is no doubt that indirect mutually beneficial relations (that maintain diversity) are to be found throughout the entire ecological community, from its producers and detritophages up to the top predators.
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Lekevičius, E. (2022). Do Consumers Maintain Diversity of Their Food Sources?. In: Biodiversity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11582-0_6
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