Antagonistic and synergistic interactions among predators

The structure and dynamics of food webs are largely dependent upon interactions among consumers and their resources. However, interspecific interactions such as intraguild predation and interference competition can also play a significant role in the stability of communities. The role of antagonistic/synergistic interactions among predators has been largely ignored in food web theory. These mechanisms influence predation rates, which is one of the key factors regulating food web structure and dynamics, thus ignoring them can potentially limit understanding of food webs. Using nonlinear models, it is shown that critical aspects of multiple predator food web dynamics are antagonistic/synergistic interactions among predators. The influence of antagonistic/synergistic interactions on coexistence of predators depended largely upon the parameter set used and the degree of feeding niche differentiation. In all cases when there was no effect of antagonism or synergism (a ( ij )=1.00), the predators coexisted. Using the stable parameter set, coexistence occurred across the range of antagonism/synergism used. However, using the chaotic parameter strong antagonism resulted in the extinction of one or both species, while strong synergism tended to coexistence. Whereas using the limit cycle parameter set, coexistence was strongly dependent on the degree of feeding niche overlap. Additionally increasing the degree of feeding specialization of the predators on the two prey species increased the amount of parameter space in which coexistence of the two predators occurred. Bifurcation analyses supported the general pattern of increased stability when the predator interaction was synergistic and decreased stability when it was antagonistic. Thus, synergistic interactions should be more common than antagonistic interactions in ecological systems.