Permanence in an Intraguild Predation Model with Prey Switching

Intraguild predation, a form of omnivory that can occur in simple food webs when one species preys on and competes for limiting resources with another species, can have either a stabilizing effect (McCann and Hastings in Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 264:1249–1254, 1997) or a destabilizing effect (Holt and Polis in Am. Nat. 149:745–764, 1997), depending on the assumptions of the system. Another type of behavior that has been observed in simple food web experiments (Murdoch in Ecol. Monogr. 39:335–354, 1969) is prey switching. Prey switching can occur when the predator prefers the most abundant prey. This has also been shown to be capable of having either a stabilizing effect or a destabilizing effect and even possibly lead to predator extinction (VanLeeuwen et al. in Ecology 88:1571–1581, 2007). Therefore, it is clear that incorporating prey switching into an intraguild predation model could lead to unexpected consequences. In this paper, we propose and explore such a model.