Optimal intraguild foraging and population stability

This article explores effects of adaptive intraguild predation on species coexistence and community structure in three species' food webs. Two Lotka-Volterra models that assume a trade-off between competition and predation strength are considered in detail. The first model does not explicitly model resource dynamics and is considered with both nonadaptive and adaptive intraguild predation; in the latter case predators choose their diet in order to maximize their instantaneous population growth rate. The second model includes resource population dynamics. Effects of adaptive intraguild predation on the community structure along a gradient in environment productivity are analyzed and compared with some experimental results of protist food webs. Conditions under which intraguild predation is adaptive are discussed for both models. It is proved that if intraguild predators are perfect optimizers then intraguild predation should decrease with increasing environmental productivity and adaptive intraguild predation is a stabilizing factor provided environmental productivity is high enough.