Related papers: Reaching Agreement in Competitive Microbial System…
Collective decision-making is a widespread phenomenon in both biological and artificial systems, where individuals reach a consensus through social interactions. While traditional models of opinion dynamics and contagion focus on pairwise…
The biological requirements for an ecosystem to develop and maintain species diversity are in general unknown. Here we consider a model ecosystem of sessile and mutually excluding organisms competing for space [Mathiesen et al. Phys. Rev.…
We study the stochastic evolution of four species in cyclic competition in a well mixed environment. In systems composed of a finite number $N$ of particles these simple interaction rules result in a rich variety of extinction scenarios,…
Competition indices are models frequently used in ecology to account for the impact of density and resource distribution on the growth of a plant population. They allow to define simple individual-based models, by integrating information…
Explaining biodiversity is a fundamental issue in ecology. A long-standing puzzle lies in the paradox of the plankton: many species of plankton feeding on a limited variety of resources coexist, apparently flouting the competitive exclusion…
Predicting competitive outcomes typically requires fitting dynamical models to data, from which interaction strengths and coexistence indicators such as invasion criteria can be produced. Methods that allow to propagate parameter…
Individuals within any species exhibit differences in size, developmental state, or spatial location. These differences coupled with environmental fluctuations in demographic rates can have subtle effects on population persistence and…
In apparent contradiction to competition theory, the number of known, co-existing plankton species far exceeds their explicable biodiversity - a discrepancy termed the Paradox of the Plankton. We introduce a new game-theoretic model for…
The evolution of antimicrobial resistance generally occurs in an environment where antimicrobial concentration is variable, which has dramatic consequences on the microorganisms' fitness landscape, and thus on the evolution of resistance.…
Frequency-dependent selection reflects the interaction between different species as they battle for limited resources in their environment. In a stochastic evolutionary game the species relative fitnesses guides the evolutionary dynamics…
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…
Non-equilibrium thermodynamics has long been an area of substantial interest to ecologists because most fundamental biological processes, such as protein synthesis and respiration, are inherently energy-consuming. Microbial communities are…
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…
We investigate the problem of speciation and coexistence in simple ecosystems when the competition among individuals is included in the Eigen model for quasi-species. By suggesting an analogy between the competition among strains and the…
It is known that the competitive exclusion principle holds for a large kind of models involving several species competing for a single resource in an homogeneous environment. Various works indicate that the coexistence is possible in an…
Many decision-making algorithms draw inspiration from the inner workings of individual biological systems. However, it remains unclear whether collective behavior among biological species can also lead to solutions for computational tasks.…
Microbes providing public goods are widespread in nature despite running the risk of being exploited by free-riders. However, the precise ecological factors supporting cooperation are still puzzling. Following recent experiments, we…
Coevolutionary dynamics is investigated in chemical catalysis, biological evolution, social and economic systems. The dynamics of these systems can be analyzed within the unifying framework of evolutionary game theory. In this Letter, we…
Mutualistic interactions are widespread in nature, from plant communities and microbiomes to human organizations. Along with competition for resources, cooperative interactions shape biodiversity and contribute to the robustness of complex…
We investigate a stochastic individual-based model for the population dynamics of host-virus systems where the microbial hosts may transition into a dormant state upon contact with virions, thus evading infection. Such a contact-mediated…