Extending the gleaner–opportunist trade-off

Abstract

Species exhibit various trade-offs that can result in stable coexistence of competitors. The gleaner–opportunist trade-off to fluctuations in resource abundance is one of the most intuitive, yet also misunderstood, coexistence-promoting trade-offs. Here, we review its history as an ecological concept, discuss extensions to the classical theory and outline opportunities to advance its understanding. The mechanism of coexistence between species that grow relatively faster than their competitors in a low-resource environment (i.e. a gleaner) versus a high-resource environment (i.e. an opportunist) was first proposed in the 1970s. Stable coexistence could emerge between gleaners and opportunists if the opportunist species (dominant in unstable environments) dampens resource fluctuations via relatively convex functional responses, while the gleaner species (dominant in stable environments) promotes fluctuations, or diminishes them less than the opportunist does, via relatively saturating functional responses. This fluctuation-dependent coexistence mechanism has since been referred to by various names, including the Armstrong–McGehee mechanism and relative nonlinearity of competition. Several researchers have argued this mechanism likely plays a relatively minor role in species coexistence owing in part to the restricted range of conditions that allow it to operate. More recent theoretical research, however, suggests that relative nonlinearity can operate over wider conditions than previously thought. Here, we identify several novel, or little explored, extensions to the gleaner–opportunist trade-off that can yield species coexistence under phenomena as diverse as fluctuations in predation/pathogen pressure, multiple resources, phenotypic plasticity and rapid evolution, amongst other phenomena. While the original definition of the gleaner–opportunist trade-off may be imperfect as a collective for these extensions, we argue that a subtle reframing of the trade-off focusing on species' performance in equilibrium versus fluctuating conditions (irrespective of preferences for high or low resources, predation pressure or other competitive factors) reveals their fundamental commonality in stable coexistence via relative nonlinearity. An extended framing shines a light on the potential ubiquity of this canonical trade-off in nature and on the breadth of theoretical and empirical terrain that remains to be trodden.