Related papers: Genetic drift opposes mutualism during spatial pop…
Species sharing a prey or a predator species may go extinct due to exploitative or apparent competition. We examine whether evolution of the shared species acts as a coexistence mechanism and to what extent the answer depends on the genetic…
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…
Plant-pollinator associations are often seen as purely mutualistic, while in reality they can be more complex. Indeed they may also display a diverse array of antagonistic interactions, such as competition and victim--exploiter…
We investigate the effect of spatial range expansions on the evolution of fitness when beneficial and deleterious mutations co-segregate. We perform individual-based simulations of a uniform linear habitat and complement them with…
We review and extend results for mutation, selection, genetic drift, and migration in a one-dimensional continuous population. The population is described by a continuous limit of the stepping stone model, which leads to the stochastic…
Mutualistic relationships among the different species are ubiquitous in nature. To prevent mutualism from slipping into antagonism, a host often invokes a "carrot and stick" approach towards symbionts with a stabilizing effect on their…
The growth and evolution of microbial populations is often subjected to advection by fluid flows in spatially extended environments, with immediate consequences for questions of spatial population genetics in marine ecology, planktonic…
Cooperation is ubiquitous in biological and social systems. Previous studies revealed that a preference toward similar appearance promotes cooperation, a phenomenon called tag-mediated cooperation or communitarian cooperation. This effect…
The evolution of cooperation often depends upon population structure, yet nearly all models of cooperation implicitly assume that this structure remains static. This is a simplifying assumption, because most organisms possess genetic traits…
The expansion of a population into new habitat is a transient process that leaves its footprints in the genetic composition of the expanding population. How the structure of the environment shapes the population front and the evolutionary…
We introduce an evolutionary metacommunity of multitrophic food webs on several habitats coupled by migration. In contrast to previous studies that focus either on evolutionary or on spatial aspects, we include both and investigate the…
We suggest a novel approach to treating symbiotic relations between biological species or social entities. The main idea is the characterisation of symbiotic relations of coexisting species through their mutual influence on their respective…
Evolutionary dynamics is often viewed as a subtle process of change accumulation that causes a divergence among organisms and their genomes. However, this interpretation is an inheritance of a gradualistic view that has been challenged at…
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…
Cooperation is ubiquitous across all levels of biological systems ranging from microbial communities to human societies. It, however, seemingly contradicts the evolutionary theory, since cooperators are exploited by free-riders and thus are…
We study the genetic interfaces between two species of an expanding colony that consists of individual microorganisms that reproduce and undergo diffusion, both at the frontier and in the interior. Within the bulk of the colony, the genetic…
When biological populations expand into new territory, the evolutionary outcomes can be strongly influenced by genetic drift, the random fluctuations in allele frequencies. Meanwhile, spatial variability in the environment can also…
In nature, most microbial populations have complex spatial structures that can affect their evolution. Evolutionary graph theory predicts that some spatial structures modelled by placing individuals on the nodes of a graph affect the…
Organisms have increased in complexity through a series of major evolutionary transitions, in which formerly autonomous entities become parts of a novel higher-level entity. One intriguing feature of the higher-level entity after some major…
Genetic drift is stochastic fluctuations of alleles frequencies in a population due to sampling effects. We consider a model of drift in an equilibrium population, with high mutation rates: few functional mutations per generation. Such…