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Coral reefs play a vital role in maintaining the ecological balance of the marine ecosystem. Various marine organisms depend on coral reefs for their existence and their natural processes. Coral reefs provide the necessary habitat for…
We develop a ``unified'' model that describes both ``micro'' and ``macro'' evolutions within a single theoretical framework. The eco-system is described as a dynamic network; the population dynamics at each node of this network describes…
The twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss define a strong need for functional diversity monitoring. While the availability of high-quality ecological monitoring data is increasing, the quantification of functional diversity so…
To better predict the dynamics of epidemics such as COVID-19, it is important not only to investigate the network of local and long-range contagious contacts but also to understand the temporal dynamics of infectiousness and detectable…
A central and long-standing issue in evolutionary theory is the origin of the biological variation upon which natural selection acts1. Some hypotheses suggest that evolutionary change represents an adaptation to the surrounding environment…
A major contribution to the onset and development of autoimmune disease is known to come from infections. An important practical problem is identifying the precise mechanism by which the breakdown of immune tolerance as a result of immune…
Until recently, much of the microbial world was hidden from view. A global research effort has changed this, unveiling and quantifying microbial diversity across enormous range of critically-important contexts, from the human microbiome, to…
Emerging marine infectious diseases pose a substantial threat to marine ecosystems and the conservation of their biodiversity. Compartmental models of epidemic transmission in marine sessile organisms, available only recently, are based on…
Dormancy is an essential strategy for microorganisms to cope with environmental stress. However, global ecosystem models typically ignore microbial dormancy, resulting in major model uncertainties. To facilitate the consideration of…
A fundamental question for evolutionary biology is why rates of evolution vary dramatically between proteins. Perhaps surprisingly, it is controversial how much a protein's functional importance affects its rate of evolution. In most…
Here we introduce a model in which individuals differ in the rate at which they seek new interactions with others, making rational decisions modeled as general symmetric two-player games. Once a link between two individuals has formed, the…
We investigate the competition dynamics of two microbial or viral strains that live in an environment that switches periodically between two states. One of the strains is adapted to the long-term environment, but pays a short-term cost,…
Epidemiological delays, such as incubation periods, serial intervals, and hospital lengths of stay, are among key quantities in infectious disease epidemiology that inform public health policy and clinical practice. This information is used…
Delays in biological systems may be used to model events for which the underlying dynamics cannot be precisely observed. Mathematical modeling of biological systems with delays is usually based on Delay Differential Equations (DDEs), a kind…
Mutation rate is a key determinant of the pace as well as outcome of evolution, and variability in this rate has been shown in different scenarios to play a key role in evolutionary adaptation and resistance evolution under stress caused by…
Many life-history traits, like the age at maturity or adult longevity, are important determinants of the generation time. For instance, semelparous species whose adults reproduce once and die have shorter generation times than iteroparous…
Longevity of a taxonomic group is an important issue in understanding the dynamics of evolution. In this respect a key observation is that genera, families or orders can each be assigned a characteristic average lifetime [Van Valen, L.,…
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.…
There is a pressing need to better understand how microbial populations respond to antimicrobial drugs, and to find mechanisms to possibly eradicate antimicrobial-resistant cells. The inactivation of antimicrobials by resistant microbes can…
Why, contrary to theoretical predictions, do marine microbe communities harbor tremendous phenotypic heterogeneity? How can so many marine microbe species competing in the same niche coexist? We discovered a unifying explanation for both…