Related papers: Phytoplankton competition in deep biomass maximum
Microbial populations exhibit a broad spectrum of nutrient utilization strategies, ranging from strategies utilizing diverse nutrients, called "generalists," to those being highly adapted to specific nutrients, called "specialists." The…
Understanding the main determinants of species coexistence across space and time is a central question in ecology. However, ecologists still know little about the scales and conditions at which biotic interactions matter and how these…
The coexistence of multiple phytoplankton species despite their reliance on similar resources is often explained with mean-field models assuming mixed populations. In reality, observations of phytoplankton indicate spatial aggregation at…
The interplay between energy efficiency and evolutionary mechanisms is addressed. One important question is how evolutionary mechanisms can select for the optimised usage of energy in situations where it does not lead to immediate…
We investigate the effects of spatial heterogeneity on the coexistence of competing species in the case when the heterogeneity is dynamically generated by environmental flows with chaotic mixing properties. We show that one of the effects…
Relations among species in ecosystems can be represented by complex networks where both negative (competition) and positive (mutualism) interactions are concurrently present. Recently, it has been shown that many ecosystems can be cast into…
Reaction-diffusion systems with a Lotka-Volterra-type reaction term, also known as competition-diffusion systems, have been used to investigate the dynamics of the competition among $m$ ecological species for a limited resource necessary to…
In this paper, we establish a reaction-diffusion-advection partial differential equation model to describe the growth of algae depending on both nutrients and inorganic carbon in a poorly mixed water column. Nutrients from the water bottom…
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…
The entanglement of population dynamics, evolution, and adaptive radiation for species competing for resources is studied. For resource harvesting, we modify the model used in Ref. Phys. Rev. Lett. 118 048103 and introduce new resource…
In its simplest form, the competitive exclusion principle states that a number of species competing for a smaller number of resources cannot coexist. However, it has been observed empirically that in some settings it is possible to have…
Explaining how competing species coexist remains a central question in ecology. The well-known competitive exclusion principle (CEP) states that two species competing for the same resource cannot stably coexist, and more generally, that the…
In the subtropical gyres, phytoplankton rely on eddies for transporting nutrients from depth to the euphotic zone. But, what controls the rate of nutrient supply for new production? We show that vertical nutrient flux depends both on the…
Microbial communities feature an immense diversity of species and this diversity is linked with outcomes ranging from ecosystem stability to medical prognoses. Yet the mechanisms underlying microbial diversity are under debate. While simple…
Recent work suggests that cross-feeding -- the secretion and consumption of metabolic biproducts by microbes -- is essential for understanding microbial ecology. Yet how cross-feeding and competition combine to give rise to ecosystem-level…
An organism that is newly introduced into an existing population has a survival probability that is dependent on both the population density of its environment and the competition it experiences with the members of that population.…
We demonstrate diversification rather than optimisation for highly interacting organisms in a well mixed biological system by means of a simple model and reference to experiment, and find the cause to be the complex network of interactions…
We study an individual-based model in which two spatially-distributed species, characterized by different diffusivities, compete for resources. We consider three different ecological settings. In the first, diffusing faster has a cost in…
In apparent contradiction to competition theory, the number of known, co-existing plankton species far exceeds their explicable biodiversity - a discrepancy termed the Paradox of the Plankton. We introduce a new game-theoretic model for…
Competitive interactions represent one of the driving forces behind evolution and natural selection in biological and sociological systems. For example, animals in an ecosystem may vie for food or mates; in a market economy, firms may…