The principle of competitive exclusion in ecology establishes that two species living together cannot occupy the same ecological niche. Here we present a model ecosystem in which the species are described by a series of phenotypic characters and the strength of the competition between two species is given by a nondecreasing (modulating) function of the number of common characters. Using analytical tools of statistical mechanics we find that the ecosystem diversity, defined as the fraction of species that coexist at equilibrium, decreases as the complexity (i.e., number of characters) of the species increases, regardless of the modulating function. By considering both selective and random elimination of the links in the community web, we show that ecosystems composed of simple species are more robust than those composed of complex species. In addition, we show that the puzzling result that there exists either rich or poor ecosystems for a linear modulating function is not typical of communities in which the interspecies interactions are determined by a complementarity rule.

• Received 29 June 2004

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.70.061914