Related papers: Growth tradeoffs produce complex microbial communi…
Ecological models traditionally explain stability and coexistence through pairwise interactions among species. These interactions can also involve groups of three or more species, higher-order interactions, which recent theory suggests can…
Mutations in a microbial population can increase the frequency of a genotype not only by increasing its exponential growth rate, but also by decreasing its lag time or adjusting the yield (resource efficiency). The contribution of multiple…
The persistence of biodiversity of species is a challenging proposition in ecological communities in the face of Darwinian selection. The present article investigates beyond the pairwise competitive interactions and provides a novel…
Cooperative behaviors are deeply embedded in structured biological and social systems. Networks are often employed to portray pairwise interactions among individuals, where network nodes represent individuals and links indicate who…
Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…
Understanding the mechanisms that govern species coexistence and biodiversity represents a fundamental challenge in ecology. This study extends the classic rock-paper-scissors model by introducing a context-dependent higher-order…
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…
Historically, musings about the structure of ecological communities has revolved around the structure of pairwise interactions, competition, predation, mutualism, etc. . . Recently a growing literature acknowledges that the baseline…
Speciation is driven by many different factors. Among those are trade-offs between different ways an organism utilizes resources, and these trade-offs can constrain the manner in which selection can optimize traits. Limited migration among…
Ecological systems comprise an astonishing diversity of species that cooperate or compete with each other forming complex mutual dependencies. The minimum requirements to maintain a large species diversity on long time scales are in general…
In a complex system, the individual components are neither so tightly coupled or correlated that they can all be treated as a single unit, nor so uncorrelated that they can be approximated as independent entities. Instead, patterns of…
Ecosystems are formed by networks of species and their interactions. Traditional models of such interactions assume a constant interaction strength between a given pair of species. However, there is often significant trait variation among…
The far-reaching consequences of ecological interactions in the dynamics of biological communities remain an intriguing subject. For decades, competition has been a cornerstone in ecological processes, but mounting evidence shows that…
In the last years, a remarkable theoretical effort has been made in order to understand stability and complexity in ecological communities. The non-random structures of real ecological interaction networks has been recognized as one key…
At what level does selective pressure effectively act? When considering the reproductive dynamics of interacting and mutating agents, it has long been debated whether selection is better understood by focusing on the individual or if…
The selection pressures that have shaped the evolution of complex traits in humans remain largely unknown, and in some contexts highly contentious, perhaps above all where they concern mean trait differences among groups. To date, the…
Microbial communities feature an immense diversity of species and this diversity is linked with outcomes ranging from ecosystem stability to medical prognoses. Yet the mechanisms underlying microbial diversity are under debate. While simple…
Varying environmental conditions affect relations between interacting individuals in social dilemmas, thus affecting also the evolution of cooperation. Oftentimes these environmental variations are seasonal and can therefore be…
Microbes providing public goods are widespread in nature despite running the risk of being exploited by free-riders. However, the precise ecological factors supporting cooperation are still puzzling. Following recent experiments, we…
Microbial communities harbor extensive fine-scale diversity: closely-related strains of the same species coexist alongside many distantly-related taxa. Yet strain coexistence remains poorly understood, largely because most studies neglect…