Adaptive Foraging

The widely observed preference of consumers for more-available resources, adaptive foraging (AF), has been documented to stabilize the dynamics of complex food webs (Valdovinos et al. 2010). In Valdovinos et al. (2013), we found that the incorporation of AF into the dynamics of the pollination networks increased the persistence and diversity of its constituent species, and reduced secondary extinctions of both plants and animals. These findings were best explained by the following underlying processes: 1) AF increased the amount of floral resources extracted by specialist pollinators, and 2) AF raised the visitation rates received by specialist plants.