Seasonal Shifts in Trophic Interaction Strength Drive Stability of Natural Food Webs

Abstract

It remains challenging to understand why natural food webs are remarkably stable despite highly variable environmental factors and population densities. We investigated the dynamics in the structure and stability of Lake Constance's pelagic food web using 7 years of high-frequency observations of biomasses and production, leading to 59 seasonally resolved quantitative food web descriptions. We assessed the dynamics in asymptotic food web stability through maximum loop weight, which revealed underlying stability mechanisms. Maximum loop weight showed a recurrent seasonal pattern with a consistently high stability despite pronounced dynamics in biomasses, fluxes and productivity. This stability resulted from seasonal rewiring of the food web, driven by energetic constraints within loops and their embedding into food web structure. The stabilising restructuring emerged from counter-acting effects of metabolic activity and competitiveness/susceptibility to predation within a diverse grazer community on loop weight. This underscores the role of functional diversity in promoting food web stability.