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The presence of nonprey or nonhosts is known to reduce the strength of consumer– resource interactions by increasing the consumer's effort needed to find its resource. These interference effects can have a stabilizing effect on consumer–resource dynamics, but have also been invoked to explain parasitoid extinctions. To understand how nonhosts affect parasitoids, we manipulated the density and diversity of nonhost aphids using experimental host–parasitoid communities and tested how this affects parasitation efficiency of two aphid parasitoid species. To further study the behavioral response of parasitoids to nonhosts, we tested for changes in parasitoid time allocation in relation to their host‐finding strategies. The proportion of successful attacks (attack rate) in both parasitoid species was reduced by the presence of nonhosts. The parasitoid Aphidius megourae was strongly affected by increasing nonhost diversity with the attack rate dropping from 0.39 without nonhosts to 0.05 with high diversity of nonhosts, while Lysiphlebus fabarum responded less strongly, but in a more pronounced way to an increase in nonhost density. Our experiments further showed that increasing nonhost diversity caused host searching and attacking activity levels to fall in A. megourae, but not in L. fabarum, and that A. megourae changed its behavior after a period of time in the presence of nonhosts by increasing its time spent resting. This study shows that nonhost density and diversity in the environment are crucial determinants for the strength of consumer–resource interactions. Their impact upon a consumer's efficiency strongly depends on its host/prey finding strategy as demonstrated by the different responses for the two parasitoid species. We discuss that these trait‐mediated indirect interactions between host and nonhost species are important for community stability, acting either stabilizing or destabilizing depending on the level of nonhost density or diversity present.

While positive interactions have been well documented in plant and sessile benthic marine communities, their role in structuring mobile animal communities and underlying mechanisms has been less explored. Using field removal experiments, we demonstrated that a large vertebrate herbivore (cattle; Bos tarurs) and a much smaller invertebrate (ants; Lasius spp.), the two dominant animal taxa in a semi-arid grassland in Northeast China, facilitate each other. Cattle grazing led to higher ant mound abundance compared with ungrazed sites, while the presence of ant mounds increased the foraging of cattle during the peak of the growing season. Mechanistically, these reciprocal positive effects were driven by habitat amelioration and resource (food) enhancement by cattle and ants (respectively). Cattle facilitated ants, likely by decreasing plant litter accumulation by herbivory and trampling, allowing more light to reach the soil surface leading to microclimatic conditions that favour ants. Ants facilitated cattle likely by increasing soil nutrients via bioturbation, increasing food (plant) biomass and quality (N content) for cattle. Our study demonstrates reciprocal facilitative interactions between two animal species from phylogenetically very distant taxa. Such reciprocal positive interactions may be more common in animal communities than so far assumed, and they should receive more attention to improve our understanding of species coexistence and animal community assembly.

The experimental design for this study in a semi-arid low elevation grassland in Jilin Province in northern China.; Effects of sheep grazing and forb removal on plant community structure in the microcosm experiments in August 2014.; Microclimates in the both large- and small-scale experiments in August 2014.; Effects of sheep grazing (control versus grazed plots) on plant community structure in large-scale experimental plots in August 2012 immediately following the sheep grazing period.

Berichte aus dem Institut für Meereskunde an der Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel No 290