Data from: Behavioral hypervolumes of spider communities predict community performance and disbandment

Predicting the outcome of species interactions is one of the core challenges of ecology. Trait-based ecology argues that a thorough understanding of the traits of interactors can enhance the predictability of ecological outcomes. Here we examine whether the multidimensional behavioral-trait diversity of communities influences community performance and stability in situ. We created experimental communities of web-building spiders, each with an identical species composition. Communities contained one individual of each of five different species. Prior to establishing these communities in the field, we examined three behavioral traits for each individual spider. These behavioral measures allowed us to estimate community-wide behavioral diversity, as inferred by the multidimensional behavioral volume occupied by the entire community. Communities that occupied a larger region of behavioral trait-space (i.e., where spiders differed more from each other behaviorally) gained more mass collectively and were less likely to disband. Thus, there appears to be a community-wide benefit to multidimensional behavioral diversity in this system, and potentially many others too.