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A microscopic agent dynamical model for diploid age-structured populations is used to study evolution of polymorphism and sympatric speciation. The underlying ecology is represented by a unimodal distribution of resources of some width.…
Competition between individuals drives the evolution of whole species. Although the fittest individuals survive the longest and produce the most offspring, in some circumstances the resulting species may not be optimally fit. Here, using…
Metagenomics has revealed hundreds of bacterial species in almost all microbiota. In a few well-studied cases, bacterial communities have been observed to coordinate their metabolic fluxes. In principle, bacteria can divide tasks to reap…
Classical models for competition between two species usually predict exclusion or divergent evolution of resource exploitation. However, recent experimental data show that coexistence is possible for very similar species competing for the…
Most of the DNA that composes a complex organism is non-coding and defined as junk. Even the coding part is composed of genes that affect the phenotype differently. Therefore, a random mutation has an effect on the specimen fitness that…
It has not been known whether preferential dispersal is adaptive in fluctuating environments. We investigate the effect of preferential and random dispersals in bet-hedging systems by using a discrete stochastic metapopulation model, where…
A microscopic model is developed, within the frame of the theory of quantitative traits, to study both numerically and analytically the combined effect of competition and assortativity on the sympatric speciation process, i.e. speciation in…
Bet-hedging is a phenotype diversification strategy that combines a fast-growing vulnerable phenotype with a slow-growing resistant phenotype. In environments switching between favorable and unfavorable conditions, bet-hedging optimizes…
This is the first of two papers where we discuss the limits imposed by competition to the biodiversity of species communities. In this first paper we study the coexistence of competing species at the fixed point of population dynamic…
Patterned vegetation is a characteristic feature of many dryland ecosystems. While plant densities on the ecosystem-wide scale are typically low, a spatial self-organisation principle leads to the occurrence of alternating patches of high…
Effects of externally imposed periodic changes in the environment on population dynamics are studied with the help of a simple model. The environmental changes are represented by the temporal and spatial dependence of the competition terms…
Reversibility of state transitions is intensively studied topic in many scientific disciplines over many years. In cell biology, it plays an important role in epigenetic variation of phenotypes, known as phenotypic plasticity. More…
Spatial extent is a complicating factor in mathematical biology. The possibility that an action at point A cannot immediately affect what happens at point B creates the opportunity for spatial nonuniformity. This nonuniformity must change…
The emergence of collective cooperation in competitive environments is a well-known phenomenon in biology, economics, and social systems. While most evolutionary game models focus on the evolution of strategies for a fixed game, how…
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…
Heterogeneous systems of active matter exhibit a range of complex emergent dynamical patterns. In particular, it is difficult to predict the properties of the mixed system based on its constituents. These considerations are particularly…
Two species with similar resource requirements respond in a characteristic way to variations in their habitat -- their abundances rise and fall in concert. We use this idea to learn how bacterial populations in the microbiota respond to…
We discuss the effects of movement and spatial heterogeneity on population dynamics via reaction-diffusion-advection models, focusing on the persistence, competition, and evolution of organisms in spatially heterogeneous environments.…
Predicting fitness of biologically-active populations, communities or systems in fluctuating environments is a long-standing challenge. Phenotypic plasticity and bet-hedging strategy, two key evolutionary traits living systems harness to…
How coperation between self-interested individuals evolve is a crucial problem, both in biology and in social sciences, that is far from being well understood. Evolutionary game theory is a useful approach to this issue. The simplest model…