The Community of Ecological Opportunities

This chapter examines ecological opportunities that are available to species in various positions within a biological community, with particular emphasis on identifying the criteria necessary for an ecological opportunity to exist. Before discussing what performance capabilities a species must have to fill different types of ecological opportunities and what is required for invasibility of species into different functional positions in a community, the chapter considers the different frameworks that have been used to model species interactions. It then describes resource and apparent competition to show how resource availability from below and predation pressure from above can affect the types of species that can exploit specifc ecological opportunities. It also analyzes communities with three trophic levels, intraguild predation or omnivory, mutualism, the mechanisms that foster coexistence between one plant species and one pollinator species, and the case of one plant species with multiple pollinators.