Related papers: Asymmetric Mutualism in Two- and Three-Dimensional…
A recent paper by James et al. finds that mutualistic interactions decrease the biodiversity of model ecosystems. However, this result can be reverted if we consider ecological trade-offs and choose parameters suitable for sparse…
Surface tension governed by differential adhesion can drive fluid particle mixtures to sort into separate regions, i.e., demix. Does the same phenomenon occur in confluent biological tissues? We begin to answer this question for epithelial…
We examine the two-dimensional extension of the model of Kessler and Sander of competition between two species identical except for dispersion rates. In this class of models, the spatial inhomogeneity of reproduction rates gives rise to an…
Phase variation, or stochastic switching between alternative states of gene expression, is common among microbes, and may be important in coping with changing environments. We use a theoretical model to assess whether such switching is a…
Geographic ranges of communities of species evolve in response to environmental, ecological, and evolutionary forces. Understanding the effects of these forces on species' range dynamics is a major goal of spatial ecology. Previous…
The ways in which natural selection can allow the proliferation of cooperative behavior have long been seen as a central problem in evolutionary biology. Most of the literature has focused on interactions between pairs of individuals and on…
Spontaneous demixing in active matter is a ubiquitous phenomenon that is crucial for numerous living processes ranging from bacterial swarming to sorting of cells in dense tissues. Here, we systematically investigate the effect of spatially…
Synergistic and antagonistic interactions in multi-species populations - such as resource sharing and competition - result in remarkably diverse behaviors in populations of interacting cells, such as in soil or human microbiomes, or clonal…
The relationship between the dynamics of a community and its constituent pairwise interactions is a fundamental problem in ecology. Higher-order ecological effects beyond pairwise interactions may be key to complex ecosystems, but…
We investigate a class of continuum models for the motion of a two-dimensional biological group under the influence of nonlocal social interactions. The dynamics may be uniquely decomposed into incompressible motion and potential motion.…
The pursuit of highest payoffs in evolutionary social dilemmas is risky and sometimes inferior to conformity. Choosing the most common strategy within the interaction range is safer because it ensures that the payoff of an individual will…
Coevolution of two species is typically thought to favour the evolution of faster evolutionary rates helping a species keep ahead in the Red Queen race, where `it takes all the running you can do to stay where you are'. In contrast, if…
Recent extensions of the Axelrod model of cultural dissemination (Klemm et al 2003) showed that global diversity is extremely fragile with small amounts of cultural mutation. This seemed to undermine the original Axelrod theory that…
To understand the biodiversity of an ecosystem cannot be understood by solely analyzing the pair relations of competing species. Instead, we should consider multi-point interactions because the presence of a third party could change the…
Standard game theory cannot describe microbial interactions mediated by diffusible molecules. Nevertheless, we show that one can still model microbial dynamics using game theory with parameters renormalized by diffusion. Contrary to…
Evolutionary transitions among ecological interactions are widely known, although their detailed dynamics remain absent for most population models. Adaptive dynamics has been used to illustrate how the parameters of population models might…
Asymmetric segregation of key proteins at cell division -- be it a beneficial or deleterious protein -- is ubiquitous in unicellular organisms and often considered as an evolved trait to increase fitness in a stressed environment. Here, we…
Pervasive natural selection can strongly influence observed patterns of genetic variation, but these effects remain poorly understood when multiple selected variants segregate in nearby regions of the genome. Classical population genetics…
Cooperative behavior is widespread in nature, even though cooperating individuals always run the risk to be exploited by free-riders. Population structure effectively promotes cooperation given that a threshold in the level of cooperation…
The spatial arrangement of individuals is thought to overcome the dilemma of cooperation: When cooperators engage in clusters they might share the benefit of cooperation while being more protected against non-cooperating individuals, which…