Related papers: Testing host-plant driven speciation in phytophago…
In the prospect of ecology and biology, studying insect-plant predation will considerably contribute to pest control, benefit agriculture and afforestation, and also help people to better understand insect-plant co-evolution. Therefore, we…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
The impact of environmental fluctuation on species diversity is studied with a model of the evolutionary ecology of microorganisms. We show that environmental fluctuation induces evolutionary branching and assures the consequential…
Insect production for food and feed presents a promising supplement to ensure food safety and address the adverse impacts of agriculture on climate and environment in the future. However, optimisation is required for insect production to…
Speciation is often associated with geographical barriers that limit gene flow. However, species can also emerge in continuous homogeneous environments through isolation by distance. When the environment is not homogeneous, natural…
Evolutionary dynamics are shaped by a variety of fundamental, generic drivers, including spatial structure, ecology, and selection pressure. These drivers impact the trajectory of evolution, and have been hypothesized to influence…
Bacteria and their bacteriophages are the most abundant, widespread and diverse groups of biological entities on the planet. In an attempt to understand how the interactions between bacteria, virulent phages and temperate phages might…
Speciation is of fundamental importance to understanding the huge diversity of life on Earth. In contrast to current phenomenological models, we develop a biophysically motivated approach to study speciation involving the co-evolution of…
Ecology and evolution are inseparable. Motivated by some recent experiments, we have developed models of evolutionary ecology from the perspective of dynamic networks. In these models, in addition to the intra-node dynamics, which…
Ecological selection is a major driver of community assembly. Selection is classified as stabilizing when species with intermediate trait values gain the highest reproductive success, whereas selection is considered directional when fitness…
Recently we have extended our the "unified" model of evolutionary ecology to incorporate the {\it spatial inhomogeneities} of the eco-system and the {\it migration} of individual organisms from one patch to another within the same…
Phylogenetics is the study of the evolutionary relationships between organisms. One of the main challenges in the field is to take biological data for a group of organisms and to infer an evolutionary tree, a graph that represents these…
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…
Geographic isolation is a central mechanism of speciation, but perfect isolation of populations is rare. Although speciation can be hindered if gene flow is large, intermediate levels of migration can enhance speciation by introducing…
Spatial extent is a complicating factor in mathematical biology. The possibility that an action at point A cannot immediately affect what happens at point B creates the opportunity for spatial nonuniformity. This nonuniformity must change…
Computer simulations are an important tool for studying the mechanics of biological evolution. In particular, in silico work with agent-based models provides an opportunity to collect high-quality records of ancestry relationships among…
The coupling between evolutionary and ecological changes (eco-evolutionary dynamics) has been shown to be relevant among diverse species, and is also of interest outside of ecology, i.e. in cancer evolution. These dynamics play an important…
Insect production for food and feed presents a promising supplement to ensure food safety and address the adverse impacts of agriculture on climate and environment in the future. However, optimisation is required for insect production to…
The contribution to an organism's phenotype from one genetic locus may depend upon the status of other loci. Such epistatic interactions among loci are now recognized as fundamental to shaping the process of adaptation in evolving…
Phylogenies are commonly used to represent the evolutionary relationships between species, and often these phylogenies are equipped with edge lengths that indicate degrees of evolutionary difference. Given such a phylogeny, a popular…