Related papers: Evolution as a coexistence mechanism: Does genetic…
Formation and competition of associations are studied in a six-species ecological model where each species has two predators and two prey. Each site of a square lattice is occupied by an individual belonging to one of the six species. The…
We study the effect of speciation, i.e. the introduction of new species through evolution into communities, in the setting of predator-prey systems. Predator-prey dynamics is classically well modeled by Lotka-Volterra equations, also when…
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…
Phenotypic plasticity and its evolution may help evolutionary rescue in a novel and stressful environment, especially if environmental novelty reveals cryptic genetic variation that enables the evolution of increased plasticity. However,…
According to the competitive exclusion principle, in a finite ecosystem, extinction occurs naturally when two or more species compete for the same resources. An important question that arises is: when coexistence is not possible, which…
We consider the dynamics imposed by natural selection on the populations of two competing, sexually reproducing, haploid species. In this setting, the fitness of any genome varies over time due to the changing population mix of the…
Many organisms live in populations structured by space and by class, exhibit plastic responses to their social partners, and are subject to non-additive ecological and fitness effects. Social evolution theory has long recognized that all of…
To examine the co-evolution of quantitative traits in hosts and parasites, we present and study a co-evolutionary model of a social parasite-host system that incorporates (1) ecological dynamics that feed back into their co-evolutionary…
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…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. It is well known that population structure can affect evolutionary dynamics. Traditionally, natural selection is studied between mutants that differ in reproductive rate, but are…
Reaction-diffusion systems with a Lotka-Volterra-type reaction term, also known as competition-diffusion systems, have been used to investigate the dynamics of the competition among $m$ ecological species for a limited resource necessary to…
We study the evolution of the network properties of a populated network embedded in a genotype space characterised by either a low or a high number of potential links, with particular emphasis on the connectivity and clustering. Evolution…
Evolutionary graph theory is a well established framework for modelling the evolution of social behaviours in structured populations. An emerging consensus in this field is that graphs that exhibit heterogeneity in the number of connections…
In order to understand the role of space in ecological communities where each species produces a certain type of resource and has varying abilities to exploit the resources produced by its own species and by the other species, we carry out…
Eco-evolutionary frameworks can explain certain features of communities in which ecological and evolutionary processes occur over comparable timescales. Here, we investigate whether an evolutionary dynamics may interact with the spatial…
Due to the conventional distinction between ecological (rapid) and evolutionary (slow)timescales, ecological and population models to date have typically ignored the effects of evolution. Yet the potential for rapid evolutionary change has…
Commonly recognized evolutionarily relevant effects of sexual reproduction include increased diversity, accelerated adaptation, and constrained accumulation of deleterious mutations, along with a secondary effect of species genotype…
We consider the effect of network structure on the evolution of a population. Models of this kind typically consider a population of fixed size and distribution. Here we consider eco-evolutionary dynamics where population size and…
We have generalized our ``unified'' model of evolutionary ecology by taking into account the possible movements of the organisms from one ``patch'' to another within the same eco-system. We model the spatial extension of the eco-system…
The networks of predator-prey interactions in ecological systems are remarkably complex, but nevertheless surprisingly stable in terms of long term persistence of the system as a whole. In order to understand the mechanism driving the…