Related papers: Colonization and Collapse
The dynamics leading to extinction or coexistence of competing species is of great interest in ecology and related fields. Recently a model of intra- and interspecific competition between two species was proposed by Gabel et al. [Phys. Rev.…
Here we present extinction, extirpation and coexistence conditions where / when two communities combine. We consider one specific model where two communities coalesce, and another model where the communities coexist side by side, blending…
Researchers puzzle over questions as to how rare species survive extinction, and why a significant proportion of microbial taxa are dormant. Computational simulation modeling by a genetic algorithm provides some answers. First, a…
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…
Segregation of populations is a key question in evolution theory. One important aspect is the relation between spatial organization and the population's composition. Here we study a specific example -- sectors in expanding bacterial…
How diversity is maintained in natural ecosystems is a long-standing question in Theoretical Ecology. By studying a system that combines ecological dynamics, heterogeneous interactions and spatial structure, we uncover a new mechanism for…
In large clonal populations, several clones generally compete which results in complex evolutionary and ecological dynamics: experiments show successive selective sweeps of favorable mutations as well as long-term coexistence of multiple…
We introduce and analyse an individual-based evolutionary model, in which a population of genetically diverse organisms compete with each other for limited resources. Through theoretical analysis and stochastic simulations, we show that the…
When four species compete stochastically in a cyclic way, the formation of two teams of mutually neutral partners is observed. In this paper we study through numerical simulations the extinction processes that can take place in this system…
A dynamic model for failures in biological organisms is proposed and studied both analytically and numerically. Each cell in the organism becomes dead under sufficiently strong stress, and is then allowed to be healed with some probability.…
A simulation model of a population having internal (genetic) structure is presented. The population is subject to selection pressure coming from the environment which is the same in the whole system but changes in time. Reproduction has a…
We present new theoretical and empirical results on the probability distributions of species persistence times in natural ecosystems. Persistence times, defined as the timespans occurring between species' colonization and local extinction…
We consider populations structured by a phenotypic trait and a space variable, in a non-homogeneous environment. In the case of sex- ual populations, we are able to derive models close to existing mod- els in theoretical biology, from a…
Here we describe how some important scaling laws observed in the distribution of languages on Earth can emerge from a simple computer simulation. The proposed language dynamics includes processes of selective geographic colonization,…
We study the stochastic evolution of four species in cyclic competition in a well mixed environment. In systems composed of a finite number $N$ of particles these simple interaction rules result in a rich variety of extinction scenarios,…
We present a model for evolving population which maintains genetic polymorphism. By introducing random mutation in the model population at a constant rate, we observe that the population does not become extinct but survives, keeping…
Highly-diverse ecosystems exhibit a broad distribution of population sizes and species turnover, where species at high and low abundances are exchanged over time. We show that these two features generically emerge in the fluctuating phase…
Population expansions trigger many biomedical and ecological transitions, from tumor growth to invasions of non-native species. Although population spreading often selects for more invasive phenotypes, we show that this outcome is far from…
We introduce a model to study the impact of catastrophes on evolutionary paths. If we do not allow catastrophes the number of changes in the maximum fitness of a population grows logarithmically with respect to time. Allowing catastrophes…
We consider a nonlinear coupled discrete-time model of population dynamics. This model describes the movement of populations within a heterogeneous landscape, where the growth of subpopulations are modelled by (possibly different) bounded…