mino.mobi / biome / intermingling lab

biome · the intermingling lab — does coupling the food webs make them more robust?

By default the terrestrial and aquatic webs are trophically disjoint — they share pools, not prey. Here you can wire real cross-web trophic edges — an amphibian whose larvae graze the lake and adults eat soil springtails, a generalist waterbird coupling three channels, a chthonic soil web (earthworm · fungus · ground-beetle) that links the green and brown energy channels — and read off the community matrix whether intermingling helps. Every config is compared against the disjoint baseline. The classic tension: May 1972 (more coupling destabilises) vs McCann/Rooney (weak fast–slow channel coupling by a mobile generalist stabilises).  → stability lab · global web · force graph

Scenarios

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Cross-web couplers

Knobs

Abundance scales how many of the coupler organisms you stock — push it up and the slow detrital modes pile toward zero (marginal). Producer area is the feeding lever: endotherms (the duck) are calorie-expensive, so a consumer-heavy web needs more leaf to keep the crew fed.

Eigenvalue spectrum (per day) — baseline ghosted

Left of the dashed line is stable. Filled dots = this web; faint rings = the disjoint baseline. Watch the rightmost dot (the verdict) and how far it sits from zero — that distance is the return rate.

Active cross-web bridges

Keystones — who moves the web when pressed (normalised)

From −J⁻¹ (Bender press perturbation). Intermingling often shifts the keystone: add the soil predator and it becomes the lever the whole web hangs on.