Related papers: Community-level cohesion without cooperation
Non-equilibrium thermodynamics has long been an area of substantial interest to ecologists because most fundamental biological processes, such as protein synthesis and respiration, are inherently energy-consuming. Microbial communities are…
Coexistence of competing species is, due to unavoidable fluctuations, always transient. In this Letter, we investigate the ultimate survival probabilities characterizing different species in cyclic competition. We show that they often obey…
The dynamics of many microbial ecosystems are driven by cross-feeding interactions, in which metabolites excreted by some species are metabolised further by others. The population dynamics of such ecosystems are governed by…
Microbiome-based stratification of healthy individuals into compositional categories, referred to as "community types", holds promise for drastically improving personalized medicine. Despite this potential, the existence of community types…
Multiple species in the ecosystem are believed to compete cyclically for survival and thus maintain balance in nature. Stochasticity has also an inevitable role in this dynamics. Considering these attributes of nature, the stochastic…
Linking the microscopic and macroscopic behavior is at the heart of many natural and social sciences. This apparent similarity conceals essential differences across disciplines: while physical particles are assumed to optimize the global…
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…
Camouflage in nature seems to arise from competition between predator and prey. To survive, predators must find prey, and prey must avoid being found. This work simulates an abstract model of that adversarial relationship. It looks at…
A fundamental problem in evolutionary ecology research is to explain how different species coexist in natural ecosystems. This question is directly related with species trophic competition. However, competition theory, based on the…
The interdependence between an individual strategy decision and the resulting change of environmental state is often a subtle process. Feedback-evolving games have been a prevalent framework for studying such feedback in well-mixed…
In the last years, a remarkable theoretical effort has been made in order to understand stability and complexity in ecological communities. The non-random structures of real ecological interaction networks has been recognized as one key…
Models of coordinated behavior of populations living in the same environment are introduced for the cases when they either compete with each other, or they both gain by mutual interactions, or finally when one hunts the other one. The…
Multilevel selection and the evolution of cooperation are fundamental to the formation of higher-level organisation and the evolution of biocomplexity, but such notions are controversial and poorly understood in natural populations. The…
The need to harmonise apparently irreconcilable arrangements in an ecosystem --nestedness and segregation-- has triggered so far different strategies. Methodological refinements, or the inclusion of behavioural preferences to the network…
Without contributing, defectors take more benefit from social resources than cooperators which is the reflection of a specific character of individuals. However, natural physical mechanisms of our society promote cooperation. Thus, in the…
Mutualistic interactions, which are beneficial for both interacting species, are recurrently present in ecosystems. Observations of natural systems showed that, if we draw mutualistic relationships as binary links between species, the…
When three species compete cyclically in a well-mixed, stochastic system of $N$ individuals, extinction is known to typically occur at times scaling as the system size $N$. This happens, for example, in rock-paper-scissors games or…
The relationship between the dynamics of a community and its constituent pairwise interactions is a fundamental problem in ecology. Higher-order ecological effects beyond pairwise interactions may be key to complex ecosystems, but…
Human society and natural environment form a complex giant ecosystem, where human activities not only lead to the change of environmental states, but also react to them. By using collective-risk social dilemma game, some studies have…
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.…