Intransitivity as a dynamic assembly engine of competitive communities

Historically, those ecological communities thought to be dominated by competitive interactions among their component species have been assumed to exhibit transitive competition, that is, a hierarchy of competitive strength from most dominant to most submissive. A surge of recent literature takes issue with this assumption and notes that some species in some communities are intransitive, where a rock/scissors/paper arrangement characterizes some components of some communities. We here propose a merging of these two ideas, wherein an intransitive subgroup of species connects with a distinct subcomponent that is organized hierarchically, such that the expected eventual takeover by the dominant competitor in the hierarchy is thwarted, and the entire community can be sustained. This means that the combination of transitive and intransitive structures can maintain many species even when competition is strong. Here, we develop this theoretical framework using a simple variant on the Lotka–Volterra competition equations to illustrate the process. We also present data for the ant community in a coffee agroecosystem in Puerto Rico, that appears to be organized in this way. A detailed study on one typical coffee farm illustrates an intransitive loop of three species that seems to maintain a distinct competitive community of at least 13 additional species.