Category: Ecology

Summary: Finding how much within-bridge competition is required to undo a nocturnal pollination rescue and push the dominant mutualistic mode back toward the phenological fringe.

Phenological mismatch can pull a pollination network away from its productive mid-season core, while a weak nocturnal bridge may temporarily restore that core by reconnecting separated activity bands. This experiment asks how much competition within that same bridge is enough to reverse the rescue and make the dominant ecological mode collapse back toward the network fringe.

The model builds dense mutualism operators with phenological structure, a rescued nocturnal bridge, and a tunable competition term inside the bridge layer. It then carries a threshold bracket across larger system sizes, bisecting the bridge-competition strength while tracking collapse fractions, recollapse ratios, localization shifts, and the leading eigenvalue.

The resulting threshold is about loss of a previously restored structural state, not just loss of total growth. That makes the experiment useful for understanding when an apparently beneficial temporal bridge becomes self-defeating once crowding or competition inside it becomes too strong.

Method: Dense symmetric eigensolves with iterative deepening and bisection on bridge-competition strength xi across phenological mutualism operators from N=64 to 2048.

What is measured: Critical competition threshold, collapse fraction, recollapse ratio, leading-eigenvalue shift, localization balance between core and fringe, and bracket width.