Energetic constraints imposed on trophic interaction strengths enhance resilience in empirical and model food webs

1. Food web stability and resilience are at the heart of understanding the structure and functioning of ecosystems. Previous studies show that models of empirical food webs are substantially more stable than random ones, due to a few strong interactions embedded in a majority of weak interactions. Analyses of trophic interaction loops show that in empirical food webs the patterns in the interaction strengths prevent the occurrence of destabilizing heavy loops and thereby enhances resilience. Yet, it is still unexplored which biological mechanisms cause these patterns that enhance food web resilience.

2. We quantified food web resilience using the real part of the maximum eigenvalue of the Jacobian matrix of the food web from a seagrass bed in the Yellow River Delta (YRD) wetland, that could be parameterized by the empirical data of the food web.

3. We found that the empirically based Jacobian matrix of the YRD food web indicated a much higher resilience than random matrices with t...