Speaker
Description
Research on consumer-resource dynamics is vast and has been addressed in both theoretical and empirical studies. A primary goal in this research agenda is to understand how mascroscopic descriptions of trophic interactions relate to the individual processes that define the consumer-resource interaction in the first place. Despite decades of studies, there is still no clear agreement on the functional forms of the per capita consumption rate of consumers (generally called “functional responses”), not only in community food webs models, but also in simple predator-prey equations. I will present a derivation of functional responses based on the theory of continuous time Markov processes to describe individual feeding interactions, emphasising their stochastic nature. Within this framework, we revisit the derivation of two of the most famous classical functional responses, the Holling Type II FR and the Beddington-DeAngelis FR. We also suggest extensions of them in multi-resource contexts. More importantly, we highlight the common assumptions underlying all these derivations. These implicit assumptions should not be overlooked when using simple models to analyze both experiments and natural consumer-resource interactions.
