  Plant-pollinator mutualistic networks are asymmetric in their interactions:
specialist plants are pollinated by generalist animals, while generalist plants
are pollinated by a broad involving specialists and generalists. It has been
suggested that this asymmetric ---or disassortative--- assemblage could play an
important role in determining the equal susceptibility of specialist and
generalist plants under habitat destruction. At the core of the argument lies
the observation that specialist plants, otherwise candidates to extinction,
could cope with the disruption thanks to their interaction with generalist
pollinators. We present a theoretical framework that supports this thesis. We
analyze a dynamical model of a system of mutualistic plants and pollinators,
subject to the destruction of their habitat. We analyze and compare two
families of interaction topologies, ranging from highly assortative to highly
disassortative ones, as well as real pollination networks. We found that
several features observed in natural systems are predicted by the mathematical
model. First, there is a tendency to increase the asymmetry of the network as a
result of the extinctions. Second, an entropy measure of the differential
susceptibility to extinction of specialist and generalist species show that
they tend to balance when the network is disassortative. Finally, the
disappearance of links in the network, as a result of extinctions, shows that
specialist plants preserve more connections than the corresponding plants in an
assortative system, enabling them to resist the disruption.
