Functional responses relate a consumer's feeding rates to variation in its abiotic and biotic environment, providing insight into consumer behaviour and fitness, and underpinning population and food‐web dynamics. Despite their broad relevance and long‐standing history, we show here that the types of density dependence found in classic resource‐ and consumer‐dependent functional‐response models equate to strong and often untenable assumptions about the independence of processes underlying feeding rates. We first demonstrate mathematically how to quantify non‐independence between feeding and consumer interference and between feeding on multiple resources. We then analyse two large collections of functional‐response data sets to show that non‐independence is pervasive and borne out in previously hidden forms of density dependence. Our results provide a new lens through which to view variation in consumer feeding rates and disentangle the biological underpinnings of species interactions in multi‐species contexts.

中文翻译：

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消费者喂食率中隐藏的密度依赖层

功能性反应将消费者的进食速度与其非生物和生物环境的变化联系起来，从而洞悉消费者的行为和健康状况，并为人口和食物网动态提供基础。尽管它们具有广泛的相关性和悠久的历史，但我们在这里表明，在经典的依赖资源和依赖消费者的功能响应模型中发现的依赖密度的类型，等同于对基础进料速率过程独立性的强有力且往往站不住脚的假设。我们首先用数学方法论证了如何量化供给与消费者干扰之间以及多种资源供给之间的非独立性。然后，我们分析了功能响应数据集的两个大型集合，以表明非独立性普遍存在，并以以前隐藏的密度依赖性形式体现出来。