Increasing network stability towards large food webs

Abstract Stability is a key attribute of complex food webs that has been for a long time in the focus of studies. It remained an intriguing question how large and complex food webs are persisting if smaller and simple ones tend to be more stable at least from a mathematic perspective. Presuming that with the increasing size of food webs their stability also grows, we analyzed the relationship between number of nodes in food webs and their stability based on 450 food webs ranging from a few to 200 nodes. Our results show that stability increases non-linearly with food web size based both on return times after disturbance and on robustness calculated from secondary extinction rates of higher trophic levels. As a methodologic novelty we accounted for food web generation time in the return time calculation process. Our results contribute to the explanation of large and complex food web persistence: in spite of the fact that with increasing species number the stability of food webs decreases at small node numbers, there is a constant stability increase over a large interval of increasing food web size. Therefore, in food web stability studies, we stress the use of food web generation times.