Related papers: Co-evolution of resource trade-offs driving specie…
Mutualistic networks are formed when the interactions between two classes of species are mutually beneficial. They are important examples of cooperation shaped by evolution. Mutualism between animals and plants plays a key role in the…
We study the evolution of the network properties of a populated network embedded in a genotype space characterised by either a low or a high number of potential links, with particular emphasis on the connectivity and clustering. Evolution…
Mutualistic networks have been shown to involve complex patterns of interactions among animal and plant species. The architecture of these webs seems to pervade some of their robust and fragile behaviour. Recent work indicates that there is…
Previous work has shown that species interacting in an ecosystem and actors transacting in an economic context may have notable similarities in behavior. However, the specific mechanism that may underlie similarities in nature and human…
Simple growth mechanisms have been proposed to explain the emergence of seemingly universal network structures. The widely-studied model of preferential attachment assumes that new nodes are more likely to connect to highly connected nodes.…
Antagonistic coevolution between hosts and parasites can have a major impact on host population structures, and hence on the evolution of social traits. Using stochastic modelling techniques in the context of bacteria-virus interactions, we…
Speciation is driven by many different factors. Among those are trade-offs between different ways an organism utilizes resources, and these trade-offs can constrain the manner in which selection can optimize traits. Limited migration among…
The observed architecture of ecological and socio-economic networks differs significantly from that of random networks. From a network science standpoint, non-random structural patterns observed in real networks call for an explanation of…
Speciation is the "elephant in the room" of community ecology. As the ultimate source of biodiversity, its integration in ecology's theoretical corpus is necessary to understand community assembly. Yet, speciation is often completely…
To examine the co-evolution of quantitative traits in hosts and parasites, we present and study a co-evolutionary model of a social parasite-host system that incorporates (1) ecological dynamics that feed back into their co-evolutionary…
Food webs represent the set of consumer-resource interactions among a set of species that co-occur in a habitat, but most food web studies have omitted parasites and their interactions. Recent studies have provided conflicting evidence on…
Species sharing a habitat will co-evolve to make use of the available resources, as consumption is modulated by competition and negative feedback loops between consumers and resources. The dietary range of a given species determines the…
We study a version of the Tangled Nature model of evolutionary ecology redefined in a phenotype space where mutants have properties correlated to their parents. The model has individual-based dynamics whilst incorporating species scale…
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 investigate how the pattern of contacts between species in mutualistic ecosystems is affected by the phylogenetic proximity between the species of each guild. We develop several theoretical tools to measure that effect and we use them to…
If two species exhibit different nonlinear responses to a single shared resource, and if each species modifies the resource dynamics such that this favors its competitor, they may stably coexist. This coexistence mechanism, known as…
Ecosystems are formed by networks of species and their interactions. Traditional models of such interactions assume a constant interaction strength between a given pair of species. However, there is often significant trait variation among…
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…
The emergence of complex networks from evolutionary games is studied occurring when agents are allowed to switch interaction partners. For this purpose a coevolutionary iterated Prisoner's Dilemma game is defined on a random network with…
Ecological networks describe the interactions between different species, informing us of how they rely on one another for food, pollination and survival. If a species in an ecosystem is under threat of extinction, it can affect other…