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Higher-order interactions in ecology can be hidden in plain sight

Violeta Calleja-Solanas, Santiago Lamata-Otín, Carlos Gómez-Ambrosi, Jesús Gómez-Gardeñes, Sandro Meloni

Featured May 17, 2026

Original Paper

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Simply

Even when species truly interact in complex ways, simple two-species models can often perfectly mimic their population changes, making the real complex interactions invisible and leading to wrong conclusions about who eats whom.

In depth
The paper demonstrates that higher-order interactions (HOIs) in ecological systems, even when substantial, can be accurately reproduced by simpler effective pairwise models fitted to the same abundance time series. This leads to a fundamental problem of mechanistic identifiability, where distinct underlying interaction mechanisms generate nearly indistinguishable dynamics, potentially causing misleading ecological interpretations of inferred pairwise interactions.

Key Takeaways

  • 1
    Higher-order interactions (HOIs) are often undetectable from species abundance time series alone, even under ideal observation conditions.
  • 2
    Fitting pairwise Lotka-Volterra models to HOI-driven dynamics can yield accurate predictions but fundamentally misrepresent the underlying ecological roles and interaction types.
  • 3
    Reliable inference of interaction structure requires complementing time-series data with additional ecological information beyond just species abundances.

Conceptual Flow

HIGH LEVEL
1
Methodology: How Hidden Interactions Were Revealed

They created fake worlds with complex interactions, then tried to explain them with simple rules, finding that the simple rules often looked correct even when they weren't.

Complex World Rules
Simulate Populations
Population Changes Over Time
2
Results: The Problem of Hidden Interactions

They found that simple rules could perfectly match the population changes from complex worlds, but the simple rules often completely misunderstood how species actually interacted.

Complex Interactions
Simple Interactions
Produce Same Population Changes
Misleading Simple Rules