Overexploitation can counteract top‐down control and the paradox of enrichment in simple food chains

Because of its high abundance or its high feeding intensity, a consumer can overexploit its resource by consuming it on a shorter timescale than resource regeneration. While this short‐term overexploitation is widespread in nature, its general implications for biotic control patterns and ecosystem stability are not clear. Here we use a resource–plant–herbivore food chain model allowing for short‐term overexploitation (i.e. the plant can overexploit the resource and/or the herbivore can overexploit the plant). We uncover the conditions under which either type of overexploitation occurs and show that they qualitatively change ecological patterns, mainly by suppressing top‐down control when interaction strength is high. When plant productivity increases, top–down control patterns are suppressed above the level at which plants start to overexploit resources. Similarly, when herbivory intensity increases, top–down control patterns disappear when plants become overexploited. Overexploitation also prevents enrichment‐driven destabilization by capping the energy fluxes in the ecosystem. These findings connect top–down and bottom–up controls in a single framework, and highlight the role overexploitation can play in structuring and stabilizing food chains via the modulation of interaction strengths.