Europe PMC · 2026-05-22
When animal species disappear from an ecosystem, the web of relationships between plants and their pollinators or seed dispersers doesn't just shrink - it restructures in predictable, non-random ways. This study found that species loss reshapes how small clusters of species interact, with the biggest changes happening in complex groupings of five or six species.
Species loss triggered non-random structural reorganization in both plant-pollinator and plant-seed disperser networks, not simple proportional shrinkage.
The largest changes were concentrated in motifs (interaction clusters) involving five or six species, meaning complex multi-species configurations are most vulnerable to reshuffling.
In plant-pollinator networks, position shifts tracked changes in species-level specialization; in plant-seed disperser networks, motif frequency changes correlated with local plant and animal species richness.