  One of the central themes in modern ecology is the enduring debate on whether
there is a relationship between the complexity of a biological community and
its stability. In this paper, we focus on the role of detritus and spatial
dispersion on the stability of ecosystems. Using Monte Carlo simulations we
analyze two three level models of food webs: a grazing one with the basal
species (i.e. primary producers) having unlimited food resources and a detrital
one in which the basal species uses detritus as a food resource. While the vast
majority of theoretical studies neglects detritus, from our results it follows
that the detrital food web is more stable than its grazing counterpart, because
the interactions mediated by detritus damp out fluctuations in species'
densities. Since the detritus model is the more complex one in terms of
interaction patterns, our results provide new evidence for the advocates of the
complexity as one of the factors enhancing stability of ecosystems.
