Emergent neutrality in consumer-resource dynamics
Fig 4
Extinction time results for the generalist (A-C) and specialist (D-F) scenarios. A: Points and error bars show average and standard errors of extinction times for species in logarithmically binned abundance categories. Curves show neutral predictions. In the generalist scenario, species extinction times match predictions from the neutral model in communities with low CV, but consistently exceed neutral predictions in communities with high CV, especially for high-abundance species. B: Plotting observed versus predicted extinction times in communities with different CV (colors) reveals that those with low CV conform closely to the neutral predictions (black line illustrates a perfect match), while higher CVs lead to increasingly poor matches to neutrality, especially for high-abundance species. Note that extinction times seem linearly related to predictions regardless of the CV. C: The slope of this relationship increases with the CV, being close to 1 (perfect match to neutral predictions) at low CV and > 1 at higher CV. D-F: Results in the specialist scenarios are analogous to the generalist scenarios, except that extinction times of high-abundance species saturate. Parameters: A-C: K = S = 50, n = 500, r = 100. D-F: K = S = 50, n = r = 100. Summary statistics were obtained from ca. 5,000 to 20,000 data points for each abundance bin in the generalists scenario, and 1,000 to 7,000 data points in the specialists scenario.