Trait adaptation enhances species coexistence and reduces bistability in an intraguild predation module

Disentangling how species coexist in an intraguild predation (IGP) module is a great step towards understanding biodiversity conservation in complex natural food webs. Trait variation enabling individual species to adjust to ambient conditions may facilitate coexistence. However, it is still unclear how co-adaptation of all species within the IGP module, constrained by complex trophic interactions and trade-offs among species-specific traits, interactively affects species coexistence and population dynamics. We developed an adaptive IGP model allowing prey and predator species to mutually adjust their species-specific defensive and offensive strategies to each other. We investigated species persistence, the temporal variation of population dynamics, and the occurrence of bistability in IGP models without and with trait adaptation along a gradient of enrichment represented by carrying capacity of the basal prey for different widths and speeds of trait adaptation within each species. Resu..., See manuscript for details.,