Related papers: Virulence as a Model for Interplanetary and Inters…
We study the interplay of population growth and evolutionary dynamics using a stochastic model based on birth and death events. In contrast to the common assumption of an independent population size, evolution can be strongly affected by…
Starting with Darwin, biologists have asked how populations evolve from a low fitness state that is evolutionarily stable to a high fitness state that is not. Specifically of interest is the emergence of cooperation and multicellularity…
When an individual's behavior has rational characteristics, this may lead to irrational collective actions for the group. A wide range of organisms from animals to humans often evolve the social attribute of cooperation to meet this…
Does an ecological community allow stable coexistence? Identifying the general principles that determine the answer to this question is a central problem of theoretical ecology. Random matrix theory approaches have uncovered the general…
It has been widely acknowledged that self-replicating space-probes (SRPs) could explore the galaxy very quickly relative to the age of the galaxy. An obvious implication is that SRPs produced by extraterrestrial civilizations should have…
Artificial broadcasts from extraterrestrial intelligences (ETIs) are a hypothetical class of celestial phenomena. Unlike known astrophysical objects, the societies that generate them may be able to replicate on galactic scales through…
The origin of altruistic behavior, i.e. the behavior that is useful for a population or a species but goes at the expense of an altruistic individual, has long been a challenge for students of evolutionary biology. The populations with…
Earth's future detectability depends upon the trajectory of our civilization over the coming centuries. Human civilization is also the only known example of an energy-intensive civilization, so our history and future trajectories provide…
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…
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…
Discrete-time models are the traditional approach for capturing population dynamics of a host-parasitoid system. Recent work has introduced a semi-discrete framework for obtaining model update functions that connect host-parasitoid…
Cooperation is prevalent in nature, not only in the context of social interactions within the animal kingdom, but also on the cellular level. In cancer for example, tumour cells can cooperate by producing growth factors. The evolution of…
Social insects in nature such as ants, termites and bees construct their colonies collaboratively in a very efficient process. In these swarms, each insect contributes to the construction task individually showing redundant and parallel…
Popular culture (movies, SF literature) and witness accounts of close encounters with extraterrestrials provide a rather bizarre image of Aliens behavior on Earth. It is far from stereotypes of human space exploration. The reported Aliens…
The organizations of insect societies, such as division of labor, task allocation, collective regulation, mass action responses, have been considered as main reasons for the ecological success. In this article, we propose and study a…
The nature of dispersal of many invasive pests and pathogens in agricultural and forestry makes it necessary to consider how the actions of one manager affect neighbouring properties. In addition to the direct effects of a potential spread…
A colony of the queenless ant species, \emph{Pristomyrmex punctatus}, can broadly be seen as consisting of small-body sized worker ants and relatively larger body-sized cheater ants. Hence, in the presence of inter-colony migration, a set…
To evaluate the feasibility of long duration, manned spaceflights, it is of critical importance to consider the selection and survival of multi-generational crews in a confined space. Negative effects, such as infertility, overpopulation…
The outcome of competition among species is influenced by the spatial distribution of species and effects such as demographic stochasticity, immigration fluxes, and the existence of preferred habitats. We introduce an individual-based model…
The symbiotic branching model describes the dynamics of a spatial two-type population, where locally particles branch at a rate given by the frequency of the other type combined with nearest-neighbour migration. This model generalizes…