Journal
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
Volume 10, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PORTFOLIO
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-78318-x
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Funding
- Natural Environment Research Council GW4+ studentship [NE/L002434/1]
- Ministry of Agriculture Land and Fisheries, Fisheries Division
- Tobago House of Assembly (THA)
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Mutualistic interactions play a major role in shaping the Earth's biodiversity, yet the consistent drivers governing these beneficial interactions are unknown. Using a long-term (8 year, including>256 h behavioural observations) dataset of the interaction patterns of a service-resource mutualism (the cleaner-client interaction), we identified consistent and dynamic predictors of mutualistic outcomes. We showed that cleaning was consistently more frequent when the presence of third-party species and client partner abundance locally increased (creating choice options), whilst partner identity regulated client behaviours. Eight of our 12 predictors of cleaner and client behaviour played a dynamic role in predicting both the quality (duration) and quantity (frequency) of interactions, and we suggest that the environmental context acting on these predictors at a specific time point will indirectly regulate their role in cleaner-client interaction patterns: context-dependency can hence regulate mutualisms both directly and indirectly. Together our study highlights that consistency in cleaner-client mutualisms relies strongly on the local, rather than wider community-with biodiversity loss threatening all environments this presents a worrying future for the pervasiveness of mutualisms.
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