Alternative food, switching predators, and the persistence of predator-prey systems

The American Naturalist
M van BaalenM W Sabelis

Abstract

Sigmoid functional responses may arise from a variety of mechanisms, one of which is switching to alternative food sources. It has long been known that sigmoid (Holling's Type III) functional responses may stabilize an otherwise unstable equilibrium of prey and predators in Lotka-Volterra models. This poses the question of under what conditions such switching-mediated stability is likely to occur. A more complete understanding of the effect of predator switching would therefore require the analysis of one-predator/two-prey models, but these are difficult to analyze. We studied a model based on the simplifying assumption that the alternative food source has a fixed density. A well-known result from optimal foraging theory is that when prey density drops below a threshold density, optimally foraging predators will switch to alternative food, either by including the alternative food in their diet (in a fine-grained environment) or by moving to the alternative food source (in a coarse-grained environment). Analyzing the population dynamical consequences of such stepwise switches, we found that equilibria will not be stable at all. For suboptimal predators, a more gradual change will occur, resulting in stable equilibria for a limit...Continue Reading

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