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.
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Species loss triggered non-random structural reorganization in both plant-pollinator and plant-seed disperser networks, not simple proportional shrinkage.
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The largest changes were concentrated in motifs (interaction clusters) involving five or six species, meaning complex multi-species configurations are most vulnerable to reshuffling.
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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.
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