While the relationship between facilitation and competition has been explored extensively in
recent years, there is also a natural link between facilitation and mutualism, as both are …

Commensalisms, interactions between two species in which one species benefits and the
other experiences no net effect, are frequently mentioned in the ecological literature but are …

Ants are probably the most dominant insect group on Earth, representing ten to fifteen
percent of animal biomass in terrestrial ecosystems. Flowering plants, meanwhile, owe their …

We reviewed the evidence on the role of ants as plant biotic defenses, by conducting meta-
analyses for the effects of experimental removal of ants on plant herbivory and fitness with …

Context dependency, variation in the outcome of species interactions with biotic and abiotic
conditions, is increasingly considered ubiquitous among mutualisms. Despite several …

Costs and benefits for partners in mutualistic interactions can vary greatly, but surprisingly
little is known about the factors that drive this variation across systems. We conducted a …

Ecology Letters (2009) 12: 1357–1366 Abstract Interactions between two populations are
often defined by their interaction outcomes; that is, the positive, neutral, or negative effects of …

Theoretical models on mutualism dynamics predict that partner traits may influence the
outcome of mutualistic interactions. However, most empirical data on this issue is restricted …

The common conception of mutualisms is of interacting species that experience enhanced
performance in the presence of each other. Most mutualisms do not always conform to this …

Interspecific facultative mutualisms typically involve guilds of interacting species, and
species within a guild can vary in the quality of services they provide. For plants that secrete …