Related papers: Biodiversity of marine microbes is safeguarded by …
Resource competition in heterogeneous environments is still an unresolved problem of theoretical ecology. In this article I analyze competition between two phytoplankton species in a deep water column, where the distributions of main…
Evolutionary dynamics can be studied in well-mixed or structured populations. Population structure typically arises from the heterogeneous distribution of individuals in physical space or on social networks. Here we introduce a new type of…
Despite major environmental and genetic differences, microbial metabolic networks are known to generate consistent physiological outcomes across vastly different organisms. This remarkable robustness suggests that, at least in bacteria,…
The emergence of collective cooperation in competitive environments is a well-known phenomenon in biology, economics, and social systems. While most evolutionary game models focus on the evolution of strategies for a fixed game, how…
What determines biodiversity in nature is a prominent issue in ecology, especially in biotic resource systems that are typically devoid of cross-feeding. Here, we show that by incorporating pairwise encounters among consumer individuals…
Evolutionary game theory is a powerful framework for studying evolution in populations of interacting individuals. A common assumption in evolutionary game theory is that interactions are symmetric, which means that the players are…
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…
Decision-making individuals often imitate their highest-earning fellows rather than optimize their own utilities, due to bounded rationality and incomplete information. Perpetual fluctuations between decisions have been reported as the…
This paper addresses the question of optimal phenotypic plasticity as a response to environmental fluctuations while optimizing the cost/benefit ratio, where the cost is energetic expense of plasticity, and benefit is fitness. The…
Relations among species in ecosystems can be represented by complex networks where both negative (competition) and positive (mutualism) interactions are concurrently present. Recently, it has been shown that many ecosystems can be cast into…
Competition between species and genotypes is a dominant factor in a variety of ecological and evolutionary processes. Biological dynamics are typically highly stochastic, and therefore, analyzing a competitive system requires accounting for…
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…
In a wide variety of natural systems, closely-related microbial strains coexist stably, resulting in high levels of fine-scale biodiversity. However, the mechanisms that stabilize this coexistence are not fully understood. Spatial…
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…
Biological organisms have to cope with stochastic variations in both the external environment and the internal population dynamics. Theoretical studies and laboratory experiments suggest that population diversification could be an effective…
We develop a theoretical framework to understand the persistence and coexistence of competitive species in a spatially explicit metacommunity model with a heterogeneous dispersal kernel. Our analysis, based on methods from the physics of…
Mutations in a microbial population can increase the frequency of a genotype not only by increasing its exponential growth rate, but also by decreasing its lag time or adjusting the yield (resource efficiency). The contribution of multiple…
Predicting species persistence within ecological communities is a fundamental challenge for both empirical and theoretical ecology. Existing methods span from mechanistic models, whose parameters are difficult to estimate from data, to…
When can complex ecological interactions drive an entire ecosystem into a persistent non-equilibrium state, where species abundances keep fluctuating without going to extinction? We show that high-diversity spatially-extended systems, in…
Understanding how a diversity of plants in agroecosystems affects the adaptation of pathogens in a key issue in agroecology. We analyze PDE systems describing the dynamics of adaptation of two phenotypically structured populations, under…