Related papers: Growth tradeoffs produce complex microbial communi…
Studies of cooperation in microbes often focus on one fitness component, with little information about or attention to the ecological context, and this can lead to paradoxical results. The life cycle of the social amoeba Dictyostelium…
Cooperation is fundamental to human societies, and the interaction structure among individuals profoundly shapes its emergence and evolution. In real-world scenarios, cooperation prevails in multi-group (higher-order) populations, beyond…
We study a version of the Tangled Nature model of evolutionary ecology redefined in a phenotype space where mutants have properties correlated to their parents. The model has individual-based dynamics whilst incorporating species scale…
Understanding how cooperative behaviours can emerge from competitive interactions is an open problem in biology and social sciences. While interactions are usually modelled as pairwise networks, the units of many real-world systems can also…
A central feature of complex systems is the relevance and entanglement of different levels of description. For instance, the dynamics of ecosystems can be alternatively described in terms of large ecological processes and classes of…
Natural ecosystems, in particular on the microbial scale, are inhabited by a large number of species. The population size of each species is affected by interactions of individuals with each other and by spatial and temporal changes in…
Higher-order networks have emerged as a powerful framework to model complex systems and their collective behavior. Going beyond pairwise interactions, they encode structured relations among arbitrary numbers of units through representations…
In order to better understand the interplay of partnership and competition in population dynamics we study a family of generalized May-Leonard models with $N$ species. These models have a very rich structure, characterized by different…
Mutualistic networks are formed when the interactions between two classes of species are mutually beneficial. They are important examples of cooperation shaped by evolution. Mutualism between animals and plants plays a key role in the…
Mutualisms are key for structuring ecological communities, but they are sensitive to environmental change and fluctuations in population size. Consequently, how mutualisms achieve stability remains an open question in ecological theory.…
Cooperative behavior is widespread in nature, even though cooperating individuals always run the risk to be exploited by free-riders. Population structure effectively promotes cooperation given that a threshold in the level of cooperation…
Non-reciprocal interactions between microscopic constituents can profoundly shape the large-scale properties of complex systems. Here, we investigate the effects of non-reciprocity in the context of theoretical ecology by analyzing a…
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…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. The structure of a biological population affects which traits evolve. Understanding evolutionary game dynamics in structured populations is difficult. Precise results have been…
When exposed to a contagion phenomenon, individuals may respond to the perceived risk of infection by adopting behavioral changes, aiming to reduce their exposure or their risk of infecting others. The social cost of such adaptive behaviors…
Complex systems, such as economic, social, biological, and ecological systems, usually feature interactions not only between pairwise entities but also among three or more entities. These multi-entity interactions are known as higher-order…
Understanding the stability of complex communities is a central focus in ecology, many important theoretical advancements have been made to identify drivers of ecological stability. However, previous results often rely on the…
Environmental changes greatly influence the evolution of populations. Here, we study the dynamics of a population of two strains, one growing slightly faster than the other, competing for resources in a time-varying binary environment…
We study the evolution of the network properties of a populated network embedded in a genotype space characterised by either a low or a high number of potential links, with particular emphasis on the connectivity and clustering. Evolution…
Understanding how species interactions shape biodiversity is a core challenge in ecology. While much focus has been on long-term stability, there is rising interest in transient dynamics-the short-lived periods when ecosystems respond to…