Related papers: Testing host-plant driven speciation in phytophago…

We have generalized our ``unified'' model of evolutionary ecology by taking into account the possible movements of the organisms from one ``patch'' to another within the same eco-system. We model the spatial extension of the eco-system…

The metaphor of holey adaptive landscapes provides a pictorial representation of the process of speciation as a consequence of genetic divergence. In this metaphor, biological populations diverge along connected clusters of well-fit…

A looming challenge for agriculture is sustainable intensification of food production to feed the growing human population. Current chemical and genetic technologies used to manage plant diseases are highly vulnerable to pathogen evolution…

The evolutionary and ecological processes behind the origin of species are among the most fundamental problems in biology. In fact, many theoretical hypothesis on different type of speciation have been proposed. In particular, models of…

Identifying undocumented or potential future interactions among species is a challenge facing modern ecologists. Recent link prediction methods rely on trait data, however large species interaction databases are typically sparse and…

We present new theoretical and empirical results on the probability distributions of species persistence times in natural ecosystems. Persistence times, defined as the timespans occurring between species' colonization and local extinction…

Phylogenetic trees are simple models of evolutionary processes. They describe conditionally independent divergent evolution of taxa from common ancestors. Phylogenetic trees commonly do not have enough flexibility to adequately model all…

This paper concerns the modeling and numerical simulation of the process of speciation. In particular, given conditions for which one or more speciation events within an ecosystem occur, our aim is to develop the necessary modeling and…

A classical view of speciation is that reproductive isolation arises as a by-product of genetic divergence. Here, individual-based simulations are used to evaluate whether the mechanisms implied by this view may result in rapid speciation…

We introduce a multi-locus genetically acquired phenotype, submitted to mutations and with selective value, in an age-structured model for biological aging. This phenotype describes a single-trait effect of the environment on an individual,…

Ecological systems show a variety of characteristic patterns of biodiversity in space and time. It is a challenge for theory to find models that can reproduce and explain the observed patterns. Since the advent of island biogeography these…

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…

The family Nymphalidae is the largest family within the true butterflies and has been used to develop hypotheses explaining evolutionary interactions between plants and insects. Theories of insect and hostplant dynamics predict accelerated…

Measuring gene expression simultaneously in both hosts and symbionts offers a powerful approach to explore the biology underlying species interactions. Such dual or simultaneous RNAseq approaches have primarily been used to gain insight…

As researchers collect increasingly large molecular data sets to reconstruct the Tree of Life, the heterogeneity of signals in the genomes of diverse organisms poses challenges for traditional phylogenetic analysis. A class of phylogenetic…

Mechanisms leading to speciation are a major focus in evolutionary biology. In this paper, we present and study a stochastic model of population where individuals, with type a or A, are equivalent from ecological, demographical and spatial…

Understanding the combined effects of climate change and habitat fragmentation on the adaptive potential of plant populations is essential for devising effective conservation strategies. This is particularly important where mating system…

A phylogeny describes the evolutionary history of an evolving population. Evolutionary search algorithms can perfectly track the ancestry of candidate solutions, illuminating a population's trajectory through the search space. However,…

Using as a narrative theme the example of Darwin's finches, a microscopic agent-based model is introduces to study sympatric speciation as a result of competition for resources in the same ecological niche. Varying competition among…

A mechanism of sympatric speciation is presented based on the interaction-induced developmental plasticity of phenotypes. First, phenotypes of individuals with identical genotypes split into a few groups, according to instability in the…