Related papers: Environmental stochasticity and the speed of evolu…
Dispersal is an important strategy that allows organisms to locate and exploit favorable habitats. The question arises: given competition in a spatially heterogeneous landscape, what is the optimal rate of dispersal? Continuous population…
In large asexual populations, multiple beneficial mutations arise in the population, compete, interfere with each other, and accumulate on the same genome, before any of them fix. The resulting dynamics, although studied by many authors, is…
In contrast to the neutral population cycles of the deterministic mean-field Lotka--Volterra rate equations, including spatial structure and stochastic noise in models for predator-prey interactions yields complex spatio-temporal structures…
Quantitative single cell measurements have shown that cell cycle duration (the time between cell divisions) for diverse cell types is a noisy variable. The underlying distribution is mean scalable with a universal shape for many cell types…
The dynamics of adaptation is difficult to predict because it is highly stochastic even in large populations. The uncertainty emerges from number fluctuations, called genetic drift, arising in the small number of particularly fit…
Organisms that exploit different environments may experience a stochastic delay in adjusting their fitness when they switch habitats. We study two species whose fitness is determined by the species composition of the local environment, as…
In exponential population growth, variability in the timing of individual division events and environmental factors (including stochastic inoculation) compound to produce variable growth trajectories. In several stochastic models of…
How fast does a population evolve from one fitness peak to another? We study the dynamics of evolving, asexually reproducing populations in which a certain number of mutations jointly confer a fitness advantage. We consider the time until a…
We introduce and analyse an individual-based evolutionary model, in which a population of genetically diverse organisms compete with each other for limited resources. Through theoretical analysis and stochastic simulations, we show that the…
Theoretical ecologists have long sought to understand how the persistence of populations depends on biotic and abiotic factors. Classical work showed that demographic stochasticity causes the mean time to extinction to increase…
Due to stochastic fluctuations arising from finite population size, known as genetic drift, the ability of a population to explore a rugged fitness landscape depends on its size. In the weak mutation regime, while the mean steady-state…
Recreational fishing is a highly socio-ecological process. Although recreational fisheries are self-regulating and resilient, changing anthropogenic pressure drives these fisheries to overharvest and collapse. Here, we evaluate the effect…
The impact of environmental variability on population size growth rate in dynamic models is a recurrent issue in the theoretical ecology literature. In the scalar case, R. Lande pointed out that results are ambiguous depending on whether…
Adaptation in a fluctuating environment is a process of fueling environmental information to gain fitness. Living systems have gradually developed strategies for adaptation from random and passive diversification of the phenotype to more…
Microbial populations generally evolve in volatile environments, under conditions fluctuating between harsh and mild, e.g. as the result of sudden changes in toxin concentration or nutrient abundance. Environmental variability thus shapes…
Microbial populations in the natural environment are likely to experience growth conditions very different from those of a typical laboratory xperiment. In particular, removal rates of biomass and substrate are unlikely to be balanced under…
We describe a continuous-time modelling framework for biological population dynamics that accounts for demographic noise. In the spirit of the methodology used by statistical physicists, transitions between the states of the system are…
A demographic Allee effect occurs when individual fitness, at low densities, increases with population density. Coupled with environmental fluctuations in demographic rates, Allee effects can have subtle effects on population persistence…
We examine the dynamics of an age-structured population model in which the life expectancy of an offspring may be mutated with respect to that of the parent. While the total population of the system always reaches a steady state, the…
Many studies have analyzed how variability in reproductive success affects fitness. However, each study tends to focus on a particular problem, leaving unclear the overall structure of variability in populations. This fractured conceptual…