Dormancy stabilizes structured food webs.

Dormancy stabilizes oscillatory dynamics in a minimal mathematical model by converting high oscillation frequency into a strong restoring force, especially in structured food webs.

• Why it matters: Strong interactions are common in nature, yet strong instability is rare, motivating mechanisms that limit or counteract instability in ecological networks.
• What they did: The authors analyze a minimal mathematical model and test dormancy’s effects on food-web stability, focusing on networks that undergo Hopf bifurcations and oscillatory instability.
• The result: Dormancy can qualitatively stabilize structured food webs with Hopf bifurcations, but rarely unstructured networks or networks with symmetric competitive or mutualistic interactions, and this holds even when only some species go dormant.

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