Functional responses of adaptive consumers and community stability with emphasis on the dynamics of plant-herbivore systems

A comparatively recent focus in consumer–resource theory has been the examination of whether adaptive foraging by consumers, manifested through the functional response, can stabilize consumer–resource dynamics. We offer a brief synthesis of progress on this body of theory and identify the conditions likely to lead to stability. We also fill a gap in our understanding by analysing the potential for adaptively foraging herbivores, which are constrained by time available to feed and digestive capacity, to stabilize dynamics in a single-herbivore/two-plant resource system. Because foraging parameters of the adaptive functional response scale allometrically with herbivore body size, we parameterized our model system using published foraging data for an insect, a small mammal and a large mammal spanning four orders of magnitude in body size, and examined numerically the potential for herbivores to stabilize the consumer–resource interactions. We found in general that the herbivore–plant equilibrium will be unstable for all biologically realistic herbivore population densities. The instability arose for two reasons. First, each herbivore exhibited destabilizing adaptive consumer functional responses (i.e. density-independent or inversely density-dependent) whenever they selected a mixed diet. Secondly, the numerical response of herbivores, based on our assumption of density-independent herbivore population growth, results in herbivores reaching densities that enable them to exploit their resource populations to extinction. Our results and those of studies we reviewed indicate that, in general, adaptive consumers are unlikely to stabilize the dynamics of consumer–resource systems solely through the functional response. The implications of this for future work on consumer–resource theory are discussed.