Impact of compatibility on the organization of mutualistic networks.

Distinct relationships such as activation, inhibition, cooperation, and competition are not established independently but in a correlated manner in complex systems. Thus the patterns of one type of interaction may reflect the impacts of other classes of interactions, but its quantitative understanding remains to be done. Referring to the plant-pollinator mutualistic networks, here we propose and investigate the structural features of a model bipartite network, in which the mutualistic relationship between two different types of nodes is established under the influence of the compatibility among the nodes of the same type.

Interspecific competition underlying mutualistic networks.

Multiple classes of interactions may exist affecting one another in a given system. For the mutualistic networks of plants and pollinating animals, it has been known that the degree distribution is broad but often deviates from power-law form more significantly for plants than animals. To illuminate the origin of such asymmetry, we study a model network in which links are assigned under generalized preferential-selection rules between two groups of nodes and find the sensitive dependence of the resulting connectivity pattern on the model parameters.