Ecology: mechanisms for consumer diversity

A variety of mechanisms can theoretically produce competitive coexistence in nature, making it hard to identify a single explanation for the maintenance of diversity in any particular system. Based on laboratory experiments with a consumer-resource system of crustacean Daphnia eating algae, Nelson et al. suggest that maintenance of genetic diversity in the consumer populations they studied depends only on the dynamics of the population structure of the consumer. We suggest that the differences in Daphnia genetic diversity that they find for different experimental treatments could equally be explained by a simple, well known mechanism: the number of coexisting competitors cannot exceed the number of shared resources. Here we confirm this possibility by using a simple mathematical model and suggest that more than one mechanism may account for the maintenance of genetic diversity observed by Nelson et al. in their system.