Related papers: Predicting evolutionary rescue via evolving plasti…
Biological systems must be robust for stable function against perturbations, but robustness alone is not sufficient. The ability to switch between appropriate states (phenotypes) in response to different conditions is essential for…
The role of species interactions in controlling the interplay between the stability of an ecosystem and its biodiversity is still not well understood. The ability of ecological communities to recover after a small perturbation of the…
Positive density-dependence occurs when individuals experience increased survivorship, growth, or reproduction with increased population densities. Mechanisms leading to these positive relationships include mate limitation, saturating…
Fluctuating environments are situations where the spatio-temporal stochasticity plays a significant role in the evolutionary dynamics. The study of the evolution of cooperation in these environments typically assumes a homogeneous, well…
In ecology, species can mitigate their extinction risks in uncertain environments by diversifying individual phenotypes. This observation is quantified by the theory of bet-hedging, which provides a reason for the degree of phenotypic…
Cells generally change their internal state to adapt to an environmental change, and accordingly evolve in response to the new conditions. This process involves phenotypic changes that occur over several different time scales, ranging from…
Environmental variability greatly influences the eco-evolutionary dynamics of a population, i.e. it affects how its size and composition evolve. Here, we study a well-mixed population of finite and fluctuating size whose growth is limited…
The complexity of an ecological community can be distilled into a network, where diverse interactions connect species in a web of dependencies. Species interact not only with each other but indirectly through environmental effects, however…
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…
We propose a model to characterize how a diffusing population adapts under a time periodic selection, while its environment undergoes shifts and size changes, leading to significant differences with classical results on fixed domains. After…
Species sharing a prey or a predator species may go extinct due to exploitative or apparent competition. We examine whether evolution of the shared species acts as a coexistence mechanism and to what extent the answer depends on the genetic…
The central goal of a dynamical theory of evolution is to abstract the mean evolutionary trajectory in the trait space by considering ecological processes at the level of the individual. In this work, we develop such a theory for a new…
Evolutionary robot systems are usually affected by the properties of the environment indirectly through selection. In this paper, we present and investigate a system where the environment also has a direct effect: through regulation. We…
1) Micro-evolutionary predictions are complicated by ecological feedbacks like density dependence, while ecological predictions can be complicated by evolutionary change. A widely used approach in micro-evolution, quantitative genetics,…
Ecological interactions can dramatically alter evolutionary outcomes in complex communities. Yet, the framework of population genetics largely neglects interactions from a species-rich community. Here, we bridge this gap by using dynamical…
There is a pressing need to better understand how microbial populations respond to antimicrobial drugs, and to find mechanisms to possibly eradicate antimicrobial-resistant cells. The inactivation of antimicrobials by resistant microbes can…
Microorganisms live in environments that inevitably fluctuate between mild and harsh conditions. As harsh conditions may cause extinctions, the rate at which fluctuations occur can shape microbial communities and their diversity, but we…
The scarcity of water characterising drylands forces vegetation to adopt appropriate survival strategies. Some of these generate water-vegetation feedback mechanisms that can lead to spatial self-organisation of vegetation, as it has been…
Most of the DNA that composes a complex organism is non-coding and defined as junk. Even the coding part is composed of genes that affect the phenotype differently. Therefore, a random mutation has an effect on the specimen fitness that…
Biological populations are subject to fluctuating environmental conditions. Different adaptive strategies can allow them to cope with these fluctuations: specialization to one particular environmental condition, adoption of a generalist…