Related papers: Bet-hedging against demographic fluctuations
Biological populations are subject to two types of noise: demographic stochasticity due to fluctuations in the reproductive success of individuals, and environmental variations that affect coherently the relative fitness of entire…
Interactions among individuals in natural populations often occur in a dynamically changing environment. Understanding the role of environmental variation in population dynamics has long been a central topic in theoretical ecology and…
Stochastic phenotype switching has been suggested to play a beneficial role in microbial populations by leading to the division of labour among cells, or ensuring that at least some of the population survives an unexpected change in…
The theory of life history evolution provides a powerful framework to understand the evolutionary dynamics of pathogens in both epidemic and endemic situations. This framework, however, relies on the assumption that pathogen populations are…
In subdivided populations, migration acts together with selection and genetic drift and determines their evolution. Building up on a recently proposed method, which hinges on the emergence of a time scale separation between local and global…
Many mathematical models of evolution assume that all individuals experience the same environment. Here, we study the Moran process in heterogeneous environments. The population is of finite size with two competing types, which are exposed…
We look at the interaction of dispersal and environmental stochasticity in $n$-patch models. We are able to prove persistence and extinction results even in the setting when the dispersal rates are stochastic. As applications we look at…
We consider a simple information-theoretic model of communication, in which two species of bacteria have the option of exchanging information about their environment, thereby improving their chances of survival. For this purpose, we model a…
Many types of bacteria can survive under stress by switching stochastically between two different phenotypes: the "normals" who multiply fast, but are vulnerable to stress, and the "persisters" who hardly multiply, but are resilient to…
Different evolutionary models are known to make disparate predictions for the success of an invading mutant in some situations. For example, some evolutionary mechanics lead to amplification of selection in structured populations, while…
We discuss stochastic dynamics of populations of individuals playing games. Our models possess two evolutionarily stable strategies: an efficient one, where a population is in a state with the maximal payoff (fitness) and a risk-dominant…
Game theory ideas provide a useful framework for studying evolutionary dynamics in a well-mixed environment. This approach, however, typically enforces a strictly fixed overall population size, deemphasizing natural growth processes. We…
We consider a system of two competing populations in two-dimensional heterogeneous environments. The populations are assumed to move horizontally and vertically with different probabilities, but are otherwise identical. We regard these…
An organism that is newly introduced into an existing population has a survival probability that is dependent on both the population density of its environment and the competition it experiences with the members of that population.…
We propose a stochastic model in evolutionary game theory where individuals (or subpopulations) can mutate changing their strategies randomly (but rarely) and explore the external environment. This environment affects the selective pressure…
We examine the switching dynamics of a stochastic population subjected to a deterministically time-varying environment. Our approach is demonstrated in the realm of ecology on a problem of population establishment. Here, by assuming a…
In this study, we couple a population dynamics model with a model for optimal foraging to study the interdependence between individual-level cost-benefits and population-scale dynamics. Specifically, we study the logistic growth model,…
Evolutionary systems must learn to generalize, often extrapolating from a limited set of selective conditions to anticipate future environmental changes. The mechanisms enabling such generalization remain poorly understood, despite their…
Coevolutionary dynamics is investigated in chemical catalysis, biological evolution, social and economic systems. The dynamics of these systems can be analyzed within the unifying framework of evolutionary game theory. In this Letter, we…
Consider a species whose population density solves the steady diffusive logistic equation in a heterogeneous environment modeled with the help of a spatially non constant coefficient standing for a resources distribution in a given box. We…