Adaptive foraging of pollinators fosters gradual tipping under resource competition and rapid environmental change
Fig 5
The coevolution of foraging effort and species abundances under increasing driver of decline dA.
The top row shows the evolution of pollinator and plant abundances under linearly increasing driver of decline dA with rate λ = 0.05, starting from a low abundance condition of Sinit = 0.1, with adaptation strength of ν = 0.7 and resource congestion q = 0.2. Each line style and color combination represents a single pollinator species in all graphs (except the plant abundance graph, top right). For example, there is one pollinator species with degree 3. Since the degree is 3, there are three solid blue lines (one for each connection to a plant species). Another example is the two pollinator species with degree 4, thus showing eight lines (four solid lines for one species and four dashed lines for another species). Since the values of the foraging effort α for each individual species add up to 1, the evolution of the foraging effort α is not shown for pollinators with degree one since they have a constant α = 1 to their single connected plant species. Pollinators with high degree rapidly become the most abundant. Furthermore, the foraging effort α drastically changes—especially around 10 time units when most species reach their peak abundance. The two pollinator species with degree 9 survive the longest and also have one plant species in which they invest most of their foraging effort after 10 time units. Other parameters in Table A in S1 Text.