The structure of food webs with adaptive behaviour

We investigate mainly analytically the influence of the implementation of population dynamics and of adaptive behaviour on the number of links in a food web and on the stability of species with a small population size. By comparing models with Lotka-Volterra and Holling type II functional responses, models with and without predator avoidance, models with linear and nonlinear constraints on the foraging efforts, and diet selection models versus patch choice models, we find that adaptive foraging always has a stabilizing effect on small populations and that nonlinear functional responses and in particular nonlinear constraints on the foraging efforts lead to more realistic link numbers in the food web. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.