Everything Is a Network, but the Network Is Not Everything - Dynamics of Stage-Structured Food Webs

Explore the dynamics of stage-structured food webs in this lecture from the Santa Fe Institute. Delve into the traditional view of ecological communities as networks of species interactions and the challenges it presents in explaining biodiversity. Examine how adding a second axis of complexity, recognizing differences between juvenile and adult individuals, yields contrasting predictions about community diversity and stability. Learn about food web models that account for stage structure and how they predict larger, more complex communities than traditional models. Discover how differences between juvenile and adult individuals in foraging capacity and predation risk can offer a natural resolution to the diversity-stability enigma of ecological communities. Gain insights into ecological theory, community stability, and the importance of considering individual differences within species for understanding complex ecosystems.