Related papers: Switching between phenotypes and population extinc…
We present a two-species population model in a well-mixed environment where the dynamics involves, in addition to birth and death, changes due to environmental factors and inter-species interactions. The novel dynamical components are…
Biological populations are subject to fluctuating environmental conditions. Different adaptive strategies can allow them to cope with these fluctuations: specialization to one particular environmental condition, adoption of a generalist…
In biology phenotypic switching is a common bet-hedging strategy in the face of uncertain environmental conditions. Existing mathematical models often focus on periodically changing environments to determine the optimal phenotypic response.…
Deterministic evolutionary game dynamics can lead to stable coexistences of different types. Stochasticity, however, drives the loss of such coexistences. This extinction is usually accompanied by population size fluctuations. We…
Complex microbial habitats see the spatial competition of different clonal bacterial populations that switch between different phenotypes. Here, we determine the effect of this subpopulation structure on the invasion of one species by…
The role of the selection pressure and mutation amplitude on the behavior of a single-species population evolving on a two-dimensional lattice, in a periodically changing environment, is studied both analytically and numerically. The…
In a wide variety of natural systems, closely-related microbial strains coexist stably, resulting in high levels of fine-scale biodiversity. However, the mechanisms that stabilize this coexistence are not fully understood. Spatial…
Population genetics struggles to model extinction; standard models track the relative rather than absolute fitness of genotypes, while the exceptions describe only the short-term transition from imminent doom to evolutionary rescue. But…
The dynamics of two competing species in a finite size community is one of the most studied problems in population genetics and community ecology. Stochastic fluctuations lead, inevitably, to the extinction of one of the species, but the…
Living species, ranging from bacteria to animals, exist in environmental conditions that exhibit spatial and temporal heterogeneity which requires them to adapt. Risk-spreading through spontaneous phenotypic variations is a known concept in…
Established populations often exhibit oscillations in their sizes. If a population is isolated, intrinsic stochasticity of elemental processes can ultimately bring it to extinction. Here we study extinction of oscillating populations in a…
We investigate the formation of stable ecological networks where many species share the same resource. We show that such stable ecosystem naturally occurs as a result of extinctions. We obtain an analytical relation for the number of…
Population dynamics of a competitive two-species system under the influence of random events are analyzed and expressions for the steady-state population mean, fluctuations, and cross-correlation of the two species are presented. It is…
Ecology and evolution under changing environments are important in many subfields of biology with implications for medicine. Here, we explore an example: the consequences of fluctuating environments on the emergence of antibiotic…
We present an explicit unified stochastic model of fluctuations in population size due to random birth, death, density-dependent competition and environmental fluctuations. Stochastic dynamics provide insight into small populations,…
We consider a stochastic population model where the intrinsic or demographic noise causes cycling between states before the population eventually goes extinct. A master equation approach coupled with a WKB (Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin)…
Understanding the mechanisms governing population extinctions is of key importance to many problems in ecology and evolution. Stochastic factors are known to play a central role in extinction, but the interactions between a population's…
Models of population growth and extinction are an increasingly popular subject of study. However, consequences of stochasticity and noise in shaping distributions and outcomes are not sufficiently explored. Here we consider a distributed…
Understanding the coexistence of diverse species in a changing environment is an important problem in community ecology. Bet-hedging is a strategy that helps species survive in such changing environments. However, studies of bet-hedging…
Biological organisms have to cope with stochastic variations in both the external environment and the internal population dynamics. Theoretical studies and laboratory experiments suggest that population diversification could be an effective…