Related papers: Diet variation in climbing perch populations inhab…
Anaerobic digestion enables the water industry to treat wastewater as a resource for generating energy and recovering valuable by-products. The complexity of the anaerobic digestion process has motivated the development of complex models.…
In freshwater ecosystems, aquatic insects that ontogenetically shift their habitat from aquatic to terrestrial play vital roles as prey subsidies that move nutrients and energy from aquatic to terrestrial food webs. As a result, these…
Microbial communities routinely have several alternative stable states observed for the same environmental parameters. Sudden and irreversible transitions between these states make external manipulation of these systems more complicated. To…
Microbes thrive in diverse porous environments -- from soil and riverbeds to human lungs and cancer tissues -- spanning multiple scales and conditions. Short- to long-term fluctuations in local factors induce spatio-temporal…
Related groups of microbes are widely distributed across Earth's habitats, implying numerous dispersal and adaptation events over evolutionary time. However, to date, relatively little is known about the characteristics and mechanisms of…
Many microorganisms live and evolve in complex fluids. Examples include mammalian spermatozoa in cervical mucus, worms (e.g., \textit{C. elegans}) in wet soil, and bacteria (e.g., \textit{H. pylori}) in our stomach lining. Due to the…
Species interactions through cross-feeding via leakage and uptake of chemicals are important in microbial communities, and play an essential role in the coexistence of diverse species. Here, we study a simple dynamical model of a microbial…
Microbial ecosystems are remarkably diverse, stable, and often consist of a balanced mixture of core and peripheral species. Here we propose a conceptual model exhibiting all these emergent properties in quantitative agreement with real…
Sea urchin feeding fronts are a striking example of spatial pattern formation in an ecological system. If it is assumed that urchins are asocial, and that they move randomly, then the formation of these dense fronts is an apparent paradox.…
Many marine invertebrates have larval stages covered in linear arrays of beating cilia, which propel the animal while simultaneously entraining planktonic prey. These bands are strongly conserved across taxa spanning four major superphyla,…
Using a simple model for the trail formation of ants, the relation between i)the schedule of feeding which represents the unsteady natural environment, ii)emerging patterns of trails connecting a nest with food resources, and iii)the…
Undulatory locomotion of microorganisms like soil-dwelling worms and spermatozoa, in structured environments, is ubiquitous in nature. They navigate complex environments consisting of fluids and obstacles, negotiating hydrodynamic effects…
Recent studies show that the microbial communities inhabiting the human intestine can have profound impact on our well-being and health. However, we have limited understanding of the mechanisms that control this complex ecosystem. Based on…
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…
Ecosystems are commonly organized into trophic levels -- organisms that occupy the same level in a food chain (e.g., plants, herbivores, carnivores). A fundamental question in theoretical ecology is how the interplay between trophic…
Microbial communities routinely have several possible species compositions or community states observed for the same environmental parameters. Changes in these parameters can trigger abrupt and persistent transitions (regime shifts) between…
One of the most highly debated questions in the field of animal swarming and social behaviour, is the collective random patterns and chaotic behaviour formed by some animal species, in particular if there is a danger. Is such a behaviour…
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…
Natural habitats of most living microorganisms are distinguished by a complex structure often formed by a porous medium such as soil. The dynamics and transport properties of motile microorganisms are strongly affected by crowded and…
Diverse processes--e.g. bioremediation, biofertilization, and microbial drug delivery--rely on bacterial migration in disordered, three-dimensional (3D) porous media. However, how pore-scale confinement alters bacterial motility is unknown…