Related papers: Noise-driven oscillations in microbial population …
Environmental variability greatly influences the eco-evolutionary dynamics of a population, i.e. it affects how its size and composition evolve. Here, we study a well-mixed population of finite and fluctuating size whose growth is limited…
Neutral dynamics, where taxa are assumed to be demographically equivalent and their abundance is governed solely by the stochasticity of the underlying birth-death process, has proved itself as an important minimal model that accounts for…
Microbial populations generally evolve in volatile environments, under conditions fluctuating between harsh and mild, e.g. as the result of sudden changes in toxin concentration or nutrient abundance. Environmental variability thus shapes…
We analyze general two-species stochastic models, of the kind generally used for the study of population dynamics. We show that the conditions for the stochastic (microscopic) model to display approximate sustained oscillatory behavior are…
Biological populations are subject to two types of noise: demographic stochasticity due to fluctuations in the reproductive success of individuals, and environmental variations that affect coherently the relative fitness of entire…
Two mathematical models of macroevolution are studied. These models have population dynamics at the species level, and mutations and extinction of species are also included. The population dynamics are updated by difference equations with…
Microbial ecosystems are remarkably diverse, stable, and often consist of a balanced mixture of core and peripheral species. Here we propose a conceptual model exhibiting all these emergent properties in quantitative agreement with real…
Identifying early warning signs of sudden population changes and mechanisms leading to regime shifts are highly desirable in population biology. In this paper, a two-trophic ecosystem comprising of two species of predators, competing for…
Species populations often modify their environment as they grow. When environmental feedback operates more slowly than population growth, the system can undergo boom-bust dynamics, where the population overshoots its carrying capacity and…
We study the effect of correlations in generation times on the dynamics of population growth of microorganisms. We show that any non-zero correlation that is due to cell-size regulation, no matter how small, induces long-term oscillations…
Biofilm communities of Bacillus subtilis bacteria have recently been shown to exhibit collective growth-rate oscillations mediated by electrochemical signaling to cope with nutrient starvation. These oscillations emerge once the colony…
We model an enclosed system of bacteria, whose motility-induced phase separation is coupled to slow population dynamics. Without noise, the system shows both static phase separation and a limit cycle, in which a rising global population…
Microbial ecosystems are commonly modeled by fixed interactions between species in steady exponential growth states. However, microbes often modify their environments so strongly that they are forced out of the exponential state into…
We introduce and study a stochastic model for the dynamics of colonial species, which reproduce through fission or fragmentation. The fission rate depends on the relative sizes of colonies in the population, and the growth rate of colonies…
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…
In nature microbial populations are subject to fluctuating nutrient levels. Nutrient fluctuations are important for evolutionary and ecological dynamics in microbial communities since they impact growth rates, population sizes and biofilm…
Environmental stochasticity is known to be a destabilizing factor, increasing abundance fluctuations and extinction rates of populations. However, the stability of a community may benefit from the differential response of species to…
Population dynamics is constrained by the environment, which needs to obey certain conditions to support population growth. We consider a standard model for the evolution of a single species population density, that includes reproduction,…
Populations of globally coupled identical maps subject to additive, independent noise are studied in the regimes of strong coupling. Contrary to each noisy population element, the mean field dynamics undergoes qualitative changes when the…
A simulation model of a population having internal (genetic) structure is presented. The population is subject to selection pressure coming from the environment which is the same in the whole system but changes in time. Reproduction has a…