Herbivore-induced pollinator limitation increases community stability of mutualism-antagonism continuum

Abstract

Plants connect both pollinators and herbivores, and motivate the exploration of community structure in ecological networks merging antagonistic and mutualistic interactions. Evidence has shown that the two opposite plant-animal interactions are not independent from each other, in particular, herbivores can affect plant-pollinator pairwise interactions. Here, we explored effects of herbivore-induced pollinator limitation on community stability (including temporal stability and composition stability) of the mutualism-antagonism continuum. Our model demonstrated that pollinator limitation can boost up both temporal stability (i.e., the proportion of stable communities) and composition stability (i.e., species persistence), while the positive effects also depend on the strength of antagonistic and mutualistic interactions. Specifically, a community with higher temporal stability has a higher composition stability. Meanwhile, the correlations between network architecture and composition stability are also affected by pollinator limitation. Therefore, our results highlight that pollinator limitation can enhance community stability and may alter network architecture-composition stability relationship, and further advance the interplay between multiple types of species interactions within ecological networks.