Related papers: Reaching Agreement in Competitive Microbial System…
The relationship between the dynamics of a community and its constituent pairwise interactions is a fundamental problem in ecology. Higher-order ecological effects beyond pairwise interactions may be key to complex ecosystems, but…
Resource competition is a fundamental interaction in natural communities.However little is known about competition in spatial environments where organisms are able to regulate resource distributions. Here, we analyze the competition of two…
We are interested in modeling some two-level population dynamics, resulting from the interplay of ecological interactions and phenotypic variation of individuals (or hosts) and the evolution of cells (or parasites) of two types living in…
The competition for resources is a defining feature of microbial communities. In many contexts, from soils to host-associated communities, highly diverse microbes are organized into metabolic groups or guilds with similar resource…
The processes and mechanisms underlying the origin and maintenance of biological diversity have long been of central importance in ecology and evolution. The competitive exclusion principle states that the number of coexisting species is…
Many biological systems are governed by difference equations and exhibit discrete-time dynamics. Examples include the size of a population when generations are non-overlapping, and the incidence of a disease when infections are recorded at…
Microbial populations generally evolve in volatile environments, under conditions fluctuating between harsh and mild, e.g. as the result of sudden changes in toxin concentration or nutrient abundance. Environmental variability thus shapes…
The ecological principle of limiting similarity dictates that species similar in resource requirements will compete, with the superior eventually excluding the inferior competitor from the community. The observation that nonetheless…
Species interactions through cross-feeding via leakage and uptake of chemicals are important in microbial communities, and play an essential role in the coexistence of diverse species. Here, we study a simple dynamical model of a microbial…
The random Lotka-Volterra model is widely used to describe the dynamical and thermodynamic features of ecological communities. In this work, we consider random symmetric interactions between species and analyze the strongly competitive…
Metagenomics has revealed hundreds of bacterial species in almost all microbiota. In a few well-studied cases, bacterial communities have been observed to coordinate their metabolic fluxes. In principle, bacteria can divide tasks to reap…
While generic competitive systems exhibit mixtures of hierarchy and cycles, real-world systems are predominantly hierarchical. We demonstrate and extend a mechanism for hierarchy; systems with similar agents approach perfect hierarchy in…
We investigate the replicator dynamics with "sparse" symmetric interactions which represent specialist-specialist interactions in ecological communities. By considering a large self interaction $u$, we conduct a perturbative expansion which…
Given an endogenous timescale set by invasion in a constant environment, we introduced periodic temporal variation in competitive superiority by alternating the species' propagation rates. By manipulating habitat size and introduction rate,…
Understanding if and how mutants reach fixation in populations is an important question in evolutionary biology. We study the impact of population growth has on the success of mutants. To systematically understand the effects of growth we…
Pathogen-mediated competition, through which an invasive species carrying and transmitting a pathogen can be a superior competitor to a more vulnerable resident species, is one of the principle driving forces influencing biodiversity in…
Why, contrary to theoretical predictions, do marine microbe communities harbor tremendous phenotypic heterogeneity? How can so many marine microbe species competing in the same niche coexist? We discovered a unifying explanation for both…
Contact processes (CP's) with particle creation requiring a minimal neighborhood (restrictive or threshold CP's) present a novel sort of discontinuous absorbing transitions, that revealed itself robust under the inclusion of different…
As ecologists increasingly adopt stochastic models over deterministic ones, the question arises: when is this a positive development and when is this an unnecessary complication? While deterministic models -- like the Lotka-Volterra model…
If two species exhibit different nonlinear responses to a single shared resource, and if each species modifies the resource dynamics such that this favors its competitor, they may stably coexist. This coexistence mechanism, known as…