Rare species can be more resilient than common ones as long as they move through their environment in a unique way.
Conservation efforts usually focus on the number of individuals left in a population, assuming that fewer animals always means higher risk. A diversity of dispersal strategies within a community is actually a much better predictor of survival than sheer abundance. A rare species that uses a different path or method to find food than its neighbors can survive even when larger populations crash. This finding turns traditional extinction models upside down by prioritizing how species move rather than just how many exist. Protecting a wide variety of behaviors is just as important as protecting a wide variety of genes.
Rare but Resilient: Dispersal diversity buffers species vulnerability
arXiv · 2604.26589
Predicting species persistence within ecological communities is a fundamental challenge for both empirical and theoretical ecology. Existing methods span from mechanistic models, whose parameters are difficult to estimate from data, to statistical tools whose context-specific parameters are less interpretable. Here, we present a general framework, grounded in the statistical physics of complex systems, that integrates the key processes governing species survival into a single measurable quantity