Related papers: Testing host-plant driven speciation in phytophago…
In ecology, species can mitigate their extinction risks in uncertain environments by diversifying individual phenotypes. This observation is quantified by the theory of bet-hedging, which provides a reason for the degree of phenotypic…
Plant-pollinator associations are often seen as purely mutualistic, while in reality they can be more complex. Indeed they may also display a diverse array of antagonistic interactions, such as competition and victim--exploiter…
How diversity is maintained in natural ecosystems is a long-standing question in Theoretical Ecology. By studying a system that combines ecological dynamics, heterogeneous interactions and spatial structure, we uncover a new mechanism for…
Ecosystems, which are intricate amalgams of biological communities and their surrounding environments, continually evolve under the influence of their myriad interactions. The world is currently facing intensifying environmental…
We study the effect of speciation, i.e. the introduction of new species through evolution into communities, in the setting of predator-prey systems. Predator-prey dynamics is classically well modeled by Lotka-Volterra equations, also when…
Dispersal is a well recognized driver of ecological and evolutionary dynamics, and simultaneously an evolving trait. Dispersal evolution has traditionally been studied in single-species metapopulations so that it remains unclear how…
One of the classical questions in evolutionary biology is how evolutionary processes are coupled at the gene and species level. With this motivation, we compare the topological properties (mainly the depth scaling, as a characterization of…
Bacteriophages are central to microbial ecosystems for balancing bacterial populations and promoting evolution by applying strong selection pressure. Here we review some of the known aspects that modulate phage-bacteria interaction in a way…
Most theories of evolutionary diversification are based on equilibrium assumptions: they are either based on optimality arguments involving static fitness landscapes, or they assume that populations first evolve to an equilibrium state…
Insects play such a crucial role in ecosystems that a shift in demography of just a few species can have devastating consequences at environmental, social and economic levels. Despite this, evaluation of insect demography is strongly…
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…
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…
Speciation is the "elephant in the room" of community ecology. As the ultimate source of biodiversity, its integration in ecology's theoretical corpus is necessary to understand community assembly. Yet, speciation is often completely…
A novel mechanism for sympatric speciation that takes into account complex bio-processes within each individual organism is proposed. According to dynamical systems theory, organisms with identical genotypes can possess differentiated…
The origin of diversification and coexistence of genes and species have been traditionally studied in isolated biological levels. Ecological and evolutionary views have focused on the mechanisms that enable or constrain species coexistence,…
A central problem in biology is to understand how organisms evolve and adapt to their environment by acquiring variations in the observable characteristics or traits of species across the tree of life. With the growing availability of…
Understanding the dynamics of genome rearrangements is a major issue of phylogenetics. Phylogenetics is the study of species evolution. A major goal of the field is to establish evolutionary relationships within groups of species, in order…
Ecosystems dynamics is often considered as driven by a coupling of species' resource consumption and its population size dynamics. Such resource-population dynamics is captured by MacArthur-type models. One biologically relevant feature…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
Understanding the emergence of biodiversity patterns in nature is a central problem in biology. Theoretical models of speciation have addressed this question in the macroecological scale, but little has been investigated in the…