Related papers: Competing metabolic strategies in a multilevel sel…
Species-rich communities, such as the microbiota or microbial ecosystems, provide key functions for human health and climatic resilience. Increasing effort is being dedicated to design experimental protocols for selecting community-level…
Ecological selection is a major driver of community assembly. Selection is classified as stabilizing when species with intermediate trait values gain the highest reproductive success, whereas selection is considered directional when fitness…
Predicting competitive outcomes typically requires fitting dynamical models to data, from which interaction strengths and coexistence indicators such as invasion criteria can be produced. Methods that allow to propagate parameter…
Complex networks have been shown to be robust against random structural perturbations, but vulnerable against targeted attacks. Robustness analysis usually simulates the removal of individual or sets of nodes, followed by the assessment of…
Resource competition in heterogeneous environments is still an unresolved problem of theoretical ecology. In this article I analyze competition between two phytoplankton species in a deep water column, where the distributions of main…
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…
Cells generally convert nutrient resources to useful products via energy transduction. Accordingly, the thermodynamic efficiency of this conversion process is one of the most essential characteristics of living organisms. However, although…
Microbial dormancy is an evolutionary trait that has emerged independently at various positions across the tree of life. It describes the ability of a microorganism to switch to a metabolically inactive state that can withstand unfavorable…
Evolutionary competition often occurs simultaneously at multiple levels of organization, in which traits or behaviors that are costly for an individual can provide collective benefits to groups to which the individual belongs. Building off…
Competitive exclusion, a key principle of ecology, can be generalized to understand many other complex systems. Individuals under surviving pressure tend to be different from others, and correlations among them change correspondingly to the…
Explaining how competing species coexist remains a central question in ecology. The well-known competitive exclusion principle (CEP) states that two species competing for the same resource cannot stably coexist, and more generally, that the…
In a complex system, the individual components are neither so tightly coupled or correlated that they can all be treated as a single unit, nor so uncorrelated that they can be approximated as independent entities. Instead, patterns of…
The possibility that evolutionary forces -- together with a few fundamental factors such as thermodynamic constraints, specific computational features enabling information processing, and ecological processes -- might constrain the logic of…
When competing species grow into new territory, the population is dominated by descendants of successful ancestors at the expansion front. Successful ancestry depends on both the reproductive advantage (fitness), as well as ability and…
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…
Microbial ecosystems are commonly modeled by fixed interactions between species in steady exponential growth states. However, microbes often modify their environments so strongly that they are forced out of the exponential state into…
Background: Speciation corresponds to the progressive establishment of reproductive barriers between groups of individuals derived from an ancestral stock. Since Darwin did not believe that reproductive barriers could be selected for, he…
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,…
Biomolecular machines transduce between different forms of energy. These machines make directed progress and increase their speed by consuming free energy, typically in the form of nonequilibrium chemical concentrations. Machine dynamics…
The growth rate of organisms depends both on external conditions and on internal states, such as the expression levels of various genes. We show that to achieve a criterion mean growth rate over an ensemble of conditions, the internal…