Related papers: Plankton: the paradox and the power law
The Sheldon spectrum describes a remarkable regularity in aquatic ecosystems: the biomass density as a function of logarithmic body mass is approximately constant over many orders of magnitude. While size-spectrum models have explained this…
One of the most fundamental rules in metabolic ecology is the allometric equation, which is a power-law scaling that describes the connection between body measurements and body size. The biological dynamics of this essentially empirical…
The origin of allometric scaling patterns that are multiples of 1/4 has long fascinated biologists. While not universal, scaling relationships with exponents that are close to multiples of 1/4 are common and have been described in all major…
One of the major characteristics of living organisms is metabolic rate, which is the amount of energy produced per unit of time. When the mass of organisms increases, the metabolic rate also increases (usually as a power function of mass),…
A new model ecosystem consisting of many interacting species is introduced. The species are connected through a random matrix with a given connectivity. It is shown that the system is organized close to a boundary of marginal stability in…
A set of general allometric scaling laws is derived for different systems represented by tree networks. The formulation postulates self-similar networks with an arbitrary number of branches developed in each generation, and with an…
Understanding the patterns and processes of diversification of life in the planet is a key challenge of science. The Tree of Life represents such diversification processes through the evolutionary relationships among the different taxa, and…
A striking feature of the marine ecosystem is the regularity in its size spectrum: the abundance of organisms as a function of their weight approximately follows a power law over almost ten orders of magnitude. We interpret this as evidence…
Metabolism of living organisms is a foundation of life. The metabolic rate (energy production per unit time) increases slower than organisms' mass. When this phenomenon is considered across different species, it is called interspecific…
This paper investigates the role of size in biological organisms. More specifically, how the energy demand, expressed by the metabolic rate, changes according to the mass of an organism. Empirical evidence suggests a power-law relation…
Scaling laws in ecology, intended both as functional relationships among ecologically-relevant quantities and the probability distributions that characterize their occurrence, have long attracted the interest of empiricists and…
The origin of allometric scaling of metabolic rate is a long-standing question in biology. Several models have been proposed for explaining the origin; however, they have advantages and disadvantages. In particular, previous models only…
For taxonomic levels higher than species, the abundance distributions of number of subtaxa per taxon tend to approximate power laws, but often show strong deviationns from such a law. Previously, these deviations were attributed to…
We develop a ``unified'' model that describes both ``micro'' and ``macro'' evolutions within a single theoretical framework. The eco-system is described as a dynamic network; the population dynamics at each node of this network describes…
In an attempt to explain the uniqueness of the coding mechanism of living cells as contrasted with multi-species structure of ecosystems we examine two models of individuals with some replicative properties. In the first model the system…
Tree-size distribution is one of the most investigated subjects in plant population biology. The forestry literature reports that tree-size distribution trajectories vary across different stands and/or species, while the metabolic scaling…
In apparent contradiction to competition theory, the number of known, co-existing plankton species far exceeds their explicable biodiversity - a discrepancy termed the Paradox of the Plankton. We introduce a new game-theoretic model for…
Production of energy is a foundation of life. Metabolic rate of organisms (amount of energy produced per unit time) generally increases slower than organisms' mass, which has important implications for life organization. This phenomenon,…
A mathematical model of interacting species filling ecological niches left by the extinction of others is introduced. Species organize themselves into genera of all sizes. The size of a genus on average grows linearly with its age,…
Key traits of unicellular species, like cell size, often follow scale-free or self-similar distributions, hinting at the possibility of an underlying critical process. However, linking such empirical scaling laws to the critical regime of…