Ecosystems as Polyphonic Readiness Fields: 3 Mutual Constraints and Ecological Coherence

Predator–Prey, Mutualisms, Competition

Ecology is usually introduced through three familiar relationship types:

predation, mutualism, and competition.

They are treated as mechanistic interactions between organisms that live in the same space.

But once we move to a relational ontology, these categories show their deeper coherence.

They are not types of interaction at all.

They are patterns of mutual constraint—ways in which perspectival cuts stabilise, repair, or destabilise an ecosystem’s readiness field.

Predator–prey, mutualism, and competition are recognisable surface forms of a more fundamental process:

multi-species co-individuation within a shared excess of ecological potential.

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1. Predator–Prey as Reciprocal Individuation Pressures

Predation is not a clash between bounded individuals but a dialectic of perspectival refinement.

The predator construes the prey as a gradient worth following; the prey construes the predator as a gradient worth avoiding. Each construal sharpens the other.

This reciprocal sharpening creates stabilised gradients in the readiness field:

• Predator responsiveness stabilises prey vigilance.

• Prey evasiveness stabilises predator orientation.

• Both together stabilise broader ecological rhythms: movement, vigilance cycles, spatial patterning.

Predation is thus a relation that individuates both sides, refining their cuts of the ecological field into increasingly coherent orientations.

In relational terms:

• Predator and prey do not interact as discrete individuals.

• They co-articulate each other’s constraints.

• Each becomes legible through the other’s perspectival commitment.

The result is not chaos but ecosystem-level coherence, produced by the continuous mutual refinement of these reciprocal construals.

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2. Mutualisms as Distributed Repairs of Ecological Coherence

Mutualism is often framed as win–win cooperation.

This is a superficial description.

Ontologically, mutualisms are distributed repair mechanisms that stabilise or restore coherence to the readiness field. They emerge precisely where system-level potential cannot be actualised by one species alone.

Examples become clearer through this lens:

• Pollinators and plants: The plant’s cut (resource uptake, reproduction) and the pollinator’s cut (nectar, navigation cues) overlap in a way that restores coherence to the reproductive field of the ecosystem.

• Fungi and roots: The fungus construes carbon; the plant construes mineral nutrients. Together they enact a coherent nutrient-cycling cut neither could actualise alone.

• Cleaning fish and clients: Predators temporarily soften their predatory cut to allow cleaners to enact a repair of parasite gradients.

Mutualisms are not cooperation in the moral or economic sense.

They are relational couplings that heal holes in the readiness landscape.

Where predation sharpens gradients, mutualisms seal fractures.

Both serve ecosystem coherence, but in different ways:

• Predation stabilises tension gradients.

• Mutualism stabilises capacity gradients.

Both are expressions of the same deeper process:

ecosystem-level coherence achieved through multi-perspectival alignment.

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3. Competition as Failure of Multi-Perspectival Coexistence

Competition is usually framed as rivalry for limited resources.

But this presumes:

• resources are fixed,

• niches are static,

• species are independent,

• and interactions occur in a zero-sum frame.

All of this contradicts the relational ontology.

From our perspective, competition is not a relationship at all.

It is the breakdown of relational differentiation.

Competition occurs when two species (or individuals) enact insufficiently differentiated cuts of the readiness field. Their perspectival slices overlap so precisely and rigidly that the system cannot sustain both without collapsing coherence.

Competition is therefore:

• a failure of perspectival divergence,

• a lack of mutual complementarity,

• an inability to co-individuate in a shared field.

Competitive exclusion is not a battle but a collapse in the ecosystem’s capacity to support two identical perspectival orientations. One lineage shifts (adapts or relocates), or one vanishes.

Unlike predation and mutualism, competition does not stabilise the ecosystem.

It marks the boundary conditions where:

• relational cuts cannot be sufficiently distinct,

• mutual constraints cannot sustain coherence,

• and ecosytem-level potential cannot be partitioned effectively.

Competition is thus the negative case that clarifies the positive work done by predation and mutualism.

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4. Coherence as Emergent Mutual Constraint

Predation, mutualism, and competition all arise from different configurations of perspectival alignment:

• Predator–prey: reciprocal sharpening

• Mutualism: distributed repair

• Competition: failed divergence

None of these relations belong to the organisms themselves.

They are ecosystem-level patterns actualised through local construals.

The ecosystem does not “orchestrate” these relations.

Nor do individuals consciously regulate them.

Instead, coherence emerges because:

• each species construes the readiness field differently,

• their cuts mutually condition one another,

• and these constraints form a stable polyphony.

This is why ecosystems are not aggregates but co-articulated networks of relational potential.

Mutual constraints produce coherence, not conflict.

Predation and mutualism both maintain the field; competition marks its failure modes.

Thus, the classical triptych of ecological relations becomes intelligible not as an inventory of interaction types but as a spectrum of ways relational cuts modulate one another.