Ecological networks balance connectivity with flexibility to perturbations

Across 1,533 ecological networks spanning different interaction types, link–species scaling converges to an intermediate regime with an overall exponent of 1.43.

• Why it matters: It remains unclear whether diverse interaction networks share a common architectural scaling regime and what principle could generate the observed intermediate sparsity.
• What they did: The authors analyzed 1,533 ecological networks to estimate an overall scaling exponent, then modeled a thermodynamic trade-off between signal propagation and response-mode diversity, optimizing it to get 1.45.
• The result: The optimized propagation–response-diversity trade-off yields an exponent of 1.45, closely matching the empirical 1.43, and random interaction rewiring generally reduces thermodynamic efficiency in the empirical networks.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.