Eco-evolutionary Dynamics of Individual-Based Food Webs - Advances in Ecological Research - page 224

available ( Bolnick et al., 2011; Lloyd-Smith, 2005; Woodward et al., 2010 ).
These data suggest that some individuals are specialized while others use a
wide range of resources or sexual encounters during their life cycle, and
patterns found in relationships between traits of individuals may differ signif-
icantly from the patterns of relationships found between species-level means
( Ar ´ ujo et al., 2010; Bolnick et al., 2002; Clark, 2010; Cohen et al., 2005;
Lloyd-Smith, 2005; Roughgarden, 1972 ). Similarly, during the past decade,
several empirical observations and theoretical results have shown a strong
temporal convergence of evolutionary and ecological dynamics ( Fussmann
et al., 2007; Hairston et al., 2005; Hendry et al., 2007; Pelletier et al., 2009;
Schoener, 2011; Thompson, 1998; Yoshida et al., 2003 ), and intriguing simi-
larities between paleo and contemporary food webs ( Dunne et al., 2008;
Martinez, 2006 ).
These results call for individual-level models that explicitly take into
account the interactions between ecological and evolutionary processes
( Pelletier et al., 2009; Post and Palkovacs, 2009 ). This is challenging,
however, because scaling up from individuals to ecological communities
( Arim et al., 2011; Castle et al., 2011 ) and ecological networks requires to
characterize explicitly the main processes driving the genetics and ecology of
speciation in the same framework, resulting in model complexity that is quite
difficult to test against the observed data. Despite this challenge, models of
interacting individuals with explicit population dynamics in the context of
ecological and evolutionary mechanisms have been developed ( Bell, 2007;
Caldarelli et al., 1998; Champagnat et al., 2006; Christensen et al., 2002;
DeAngelis and Mooij, 2005; Drossel et al., 2001; Hiroshi et al., 2009; Lotka,
1956; McKane and Newman, 2004; Pascual, 2005; Rossberg et al., 2005 ), but
what has been missing are comparisons between testable models taking into
account reproduction mode and trophic dynamics of individuals with explicit
genetic differentiation and speciation mechanisms with data to analyse pres-
ent day patterns of individual trophic rate or diets with species-level food web
patterns and their consequences to species diversity.
Neutral biodiversity theory provides a framework to connect the effects of
stochastic variation in deaths and births among individuals with population
and metacommunity dynamics ( Hubbell, 2001 ). Some predictions from the
original theory, like species lifetimes and speciation rates, often disagree with
fossil data ( Nee, 2005; Ricklefs, 2006 ), but recent progress of the theory,
specifically those dealing with different modes of speciation ( Allen and
Savage, 2007; Haegeman and Etienne, 2009 ) and delays in the speciation
rate ( Rosindell et al., 2010 ), have improved those predictions. Overall, these
results have shown that speciation modes alter contemporary patterns of
diversity, and the distribution of incipient species abundance is neither
dominated by point mutation (i.e. one individual is the size of the new
species) nor by an equal partition abundance of the incipient species