Heterogeneity among and competition between life stages together extend the stability boundary of complex ecological communities

Abstract

Classical models of pairwise species interactions consistently predict that large, complex communities are inherently unstable, yet the observed persistence of diverse communities highlights a central contradiction in theoretical ecology. While foundational frameworks often model species as homogeneous populations, one theoretical resolution lies in including internal species structure. In this work, we incorporate explicit demographic stage structure into a generalized Lotka-Volterra framework to evaluate how ontogenetic changes throughout the life cycle of a species can affect whole-community stability. We show that stage-dependence of inter-specific interactions can significantly expand the stable parameter space for a species network. Furthermore, this enhanced stability requires strong competition between life stages of a species. Our study illustrates that stage structure with population heterogeneity expands classical stability criteria, providing a mathematical foundation for understanding how ontogeny modifies the classically derived complexity boundaries for local asymptotic stability.