Related papers: Avoiding extinction by migration: The case of the …
The fitness of a biological strategy is typically measured by its expected reproductive rate, the first moment of its offspring distribution. However, strategies with high expected rates can also have high probabilities of extinction. A…
We consider a discrete-time host-parasite model for a population of cells which are colonized by proliferating parasites. The cell population grows like an ordinary Galton-Watson process, but in reflection of real biological settings the…
Cyclic dominance between species may yield spiral waves that are known to provide a mechanism enabling persistent species coexistence. This observation holds true even in presence of spatial heterogeneity in the form of quenched disorder.…
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…
Given an endogenous timescale set by invasion in a constant environment, we introduced periodic temporal variation in competitive superiority by alternating the species' propagation rates. By manipulating habitat size and introduction rate,…
The extinction and persistence of infective individuals are closely related to the random change of the environment. In this paper, via the random/stochastic SIRS models, we analyze qualitatively and quantitatively the impact caused by the…
Understanding whether a population will survive and flourish or become extinct is a central question in population biology. One way of exploring this question is to study population dynamics using reaction-diffusion equations, where…
Cooperative interactions pervade in a broad range of many-body populations, such as ecological communities, social organizations, and economic webs. We investigate the dynamics of a population of two equivalent species A and B that are…
Cyclic dominance is frequently believed to be a mechanism that maintains diversity of competing species. But this delicate balance could also be fragile if some of the members is weakened because an extinction of a species will involve the…
We analyse a model consisting of a population of individuals which is subdivided into a finite set of demes, each of which has a fixed but differing number of individuals. The individuals can reproduce, die and migrate between the demes…
Geographic barriers prevent migration between populations, thereby facilitating speciation through allopatry. However, these barriers can exhibit dynamic behavior in nature, promoting cycles of expansion and contraction of populations. Such…
Divergence between populations for a given trait can be driven by natural or sexual selection, interacting with migration behaviour. Mating preference for different phenotypes can lead to the emergence and persistence of differentiated…
Population genetics struggles to model extinction; standard models track the relative rather than absolute fitness of genotypes, while the exceptions describe only the short-term transition from imminent doom to evolutionary rescue. But…
Infectious diseases outbreaks are often characterized by a spatial component induced by hosts' distribution, mobility, and interactions. Spatial models that incorporate hosts' movements are being used to describe these processes, to…
We study the population dynamics of lytic viruses which replicate slowly in dividing host cells within an organism or cell culture, and find a range of viral replication rates that allows viruses to persist, avoiding extinction of host…
Through the lens of game theory, cooperation is frequently considered an unsustainable strategy: if an entire population is cooperating, each indi- vidual can increase its overall fitness by choosing not to cooperate, thereby still…
In a wide variety of natural systems, closely-related microbial strains coexist stably, resulting in high levels of fine-scale biodiversity. However, the mechanisms that stabilize this coexistence are not fully understood. Spatial…
Heterogeneities in environmental conditions often induce corresponding heterogeneities in the distribution of species. In the extreme case of a localized patch of increased growth rates, reproducing populations can become strongly…
The strong Allee effect plays an important role on the evolution of population in ecological systems. One important concept is the Allee threshold that determines the persistence or extinction of the population in a long time. In general, a…
Current theories about mechanisms promoting species co-existence in diverse communities assume that species only interact ecologically. Species are treated as discrete evolutionary entities, even though abundant empirical evidence indicates…