Comment on "Foraging Adaptation and the Relationship Between Food-Web Complexity and Stability"

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Abstract
In light of the Kondoh result's importance, we reexamined the possible inversion of the negative complexity–stability relationship, focusing on three aspects of the original analysis (6). One aspect concerned the use of the random and cascade models but not the recently developed niche model, which reproduces some important structural characteristics of natural food webs more accurately than the former models (7). Another aspect was the use of a linear nonsaturating “type I” functional response of consumption to resource density that has largely been rejected in favor of nonlinear saturating “type II” responses, which capture the fact that organisms generally have maximum consumption rates that are not increased despite further increases in resource density (3, 4). The third aspect concerns the intrinsic growth terms that cause consumers to grow without consuming resources, presumably because of immigration— though no emigration was allowed in the model (6). Although intrinsic growth terms are usual for organisms, such as plants, that receive energy from outside the ecological community, the persistence of trophic consumers generally depends on whether they can eat and assimilate more energy than they lose to metabolism and predators (3, 4, 9).