Consumers’ active choice behavior promotes coevolutionary units

Abstract

Individual behavior, and local context are processes that can influence the structure and evolution of ecological interactions. In trophic interactions, consumers can increase their fitness by actively choosing resources they are able to explore. The effect of active choice on interaction network structure and their coevolution is not well known. Using an individual-based model, we modeled a community of several species that interact antagonistically. The trait of each individual is modelled explicitly and subjected to the interaction pressure. Besides, each consumer can actively choose to interact with resources that maximize its fitness. We show that active consumer choice can generate coevolutionary units, that is, the modules are formed by coevolution and stay stable over time. Besides, inside each module resource traits converge which promotes attack dilution: when resources converge their traits, the pool of options for a consumer increases and the chance of a specific individual being attacked decreases. We also observed that active consumer choice impacts network structure, with networks more modular and specialized and less connected and nested as the number of consumer choices increase. Thus, we emphasize that the consumers'ctive choice behaviour plays an important role in the ecological and evolutionary aprocesses that structure these communities.