DRAGGING IN MUTUALISTIC NETWORKS

Mutualistic networks are considered an example of resilience against perturbations. Mutualistic interactions are beneficial for the two sets of species involved. Network robustness has been usually measured in terms of extinction sequences, i.e., nodes are removed from the empirical bipartite network one subset (primary extinctions) and the number of extinctions on the other subset (secondary extinction) is computed. This is a first approach to study ecosystems extinction. However, each interacting species, depicted as a node of the mutualistic network, is really composed by certain number of individuals (population) and its shortage can diminish dramatically the population of its interacting partners, i.e. the population dynamics plays an important role in the robustness of the ecological networks. Although different models of population dynamics for mutualistic interacting species have been addressed, like Type II models, only recently a new mutualistic model has been proposed exhibiting bounded solutions and good properties for simulation. In this paper we show that population dynamics is as important as network topology when we are interested in the resilience of the community.