Measuring asymmetry in insect-plant networks

Abstract

In this work we focus on interaction networks between insects and plants and in the characterization of insect plant asymmetry, an important issue in coevolution and evolutionary biology. We analyze in particular the asymmetry in the interaction matrix of animals (herbivorous insects) and plants (food resource for the insects). Instead of driving our attention to the interaction matrix itself we derive two networks associated to the bipartite network: the animal network, D1, and the plant network, D2. These networks are constructed according to the following recipe: two animal species are linked once if they interact with the same plant. In a similar way, in the plant network, two plants are linked if they interact with the same animal. To explore the asymmetry between D2 and D1 we test for a set of 23 networks from the ecologic literature networks: the difference in size, ΔL, clustering coefficient difference, ΔC, and mean connectivity difference, Δ. We used a nonparametric statistical test to check the differences in ΔL, ΔC and Δ. Our results indicate that ΔL and Δ show a significative asymmetry. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.