Related papers: Bet-hedging strategies in expanding populations
Individual choices are either based on personal experience or on information provided by peers. The latter case, causes individuals to conform to the majority in their neighborhood. Such herding behavior may be very efficient in aggregating…
Environmental fluctuations can create population-depleted areas and even extinct areas for the population. This effect is more severe in the presence of the Allee effect (decreasing growth rate at low population densities). Dispersal inside…
Spatial structure and species interactions jointly shape the dynamics and biodiversity of ecological systems, yet most theoretical models either neglect spatial heterogeneity or sacrifice analytical tractability. Here, we provide a unified…
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…
Understanding the evolution of dispersal is an important issue in evolutionary ecology. For continuous time models in which individuals disperse throughout their lifetime, it has been shown that a balanced dispersal strategy, which results…
We study a stochastic model proposed recently in the genetic literature to explain the heterogeneity of cell populations or of gene products. Cells are located in two colonies, whose sizes fluctuate as birth and migration processes in…
Background: Speciation corresponds to the progressive establishment of reproductive barriers between groups of individuals derived from an ancestral stock. Since Darwin did not believe that reproductive barriers could be selected for, he…
We study how changes in population size and fluctuating environmental conditions influence the establishment of seed banks in plants. Our model is a modification of the Wright-Fisher model with seed bank, introduced by Kaj, Krone and…
We propose a general model to study the interplay between spatial dispersal and environment spatiotemporal fluctuations in metapopulation dynamics. An ecological landscape of favorable patches is generated like a L\'{e}vy dust, which allows…
The evolution of dispersal rate is studied with a model of several local populations linked by dispersal. Three dispersal strategies are considered where all, half, or none of the offspring disperse. The spatial scale (number of patches)…
Two species with similar resource requirements respond in a characteristic way to variations in their habitat -- their abundances rise and fall in concert. We use this idea to learn how bacterial populations in the microbiota respond to…
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…
In social situations with which evolutionary game is concerned, individuals are considered to be heterogeneous in various aspects. In particular, they may differently perceive the same outcome of the game owing to heterogeneity in…
Heterogeneities in environmental conditions often induce corresponding heterogeneities in the distribution of species. In the extreme case of a localized patch of increased growth rates, reproducing populations can become strongly…
One essential ingredient of evolutionary theory is the concept of fitness as a measure for a species' success in its living conditions. Here, we quantify the effect of environmental fluctuations onto fitness by analytical calculations on a…
Microbiomes are complex systems comprised of many interacting species. Species can survive harsh or changing conditions by rapid adaptation, a process accelerated by the exchange of genetic material between different species through…
We propose a model to characterize how a diffusing population adapts under a time periodic selection, while its environment undergoes shifts and size changes, leading to significant differences with classical results on fixed domains. After…
Environmental stochasticity is known to be a destabilizing factor, increasing abundance fluctuations and extinction rates of populations. However, the stability of a community may benefit from the differential response of species to…
Evolutionary games provide the theoretical backbone for many aspects of our social life: from cooperation to crime, from climate inaction to imperfect vaccination and epidemic spreading, from antibiotics overuse to biodiversity…
The goal of this article is to contribute towards the conceptual and quantitative understanding of the evolutionary benefits for (microbial) populations to maintain a seed bank (consisting of dormant individuals) when facing fluctuating…