Related papers: Competition, Trait Variance Dynamics, and the Evol…
This paper is concerned with a mathematical model of competition for resource where species consume noninteracting resources. This system of differential equations is formally obtained by renormalizing the MacArthur's competition model at…
Competitive interactions represent one of the driving forces behind evolution and natural selection in biological and sociological systems. For example, animals in an ecosystem may vie for food or mates; in a market economy, firms may…
We perform individual-based Monte Carlo simulations in a community consisting of two predator species competing for a single prey species, with the purpose of studying biodiversity stabilization in this simple model system. Predators are…
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…
Non-uniform rates of morphological evolution and evolutionary increases in organismal complexity, captured in metaphors like "adaptive zones", "punctuated equilibrium" and "blunderbuss patterns", require more elaborate explanations than a…
The expansion of a population into new habitat is a transient process that leaves its footprints in the genetic composition of the expanding population. How the structure of the environment shapes the population front and the evolutionary…
Dynamics of a social population is analyzed taking into account some physical constraints on individual behavior and decision making abilities. The model, based on Evolutionary Game Theory, predicts that a population has to pass through a…
Ecology and evolution are inseparable. Motivated by some recent experiments, we have developed models of evolutionary ecology from the perspective of dynamic networks. In these models, in addition to the intra-node dynamics, which…
In natural ecosystems, species can be characterized by the nonlinear density-dependent self-regulation of their growth profile. Species of many taxa show a substantial density-dependent reduction for low population size. Nevertheless, many…
Simulation of population dynamics is a central research theme in computational biology, which contributes to understanding the interactions between predators and preys. Conventional mathematical tools of this theme, however, are incapable…
Species' interactions are shaped by their traits. Thus, we expect traits -- in particular, trait (dis)similarity -- to play a central role in determining whether a particular set of species coexists. Traits are, in turn, the outcome of an…
How large ecosystems can create and maintain the remarkable biodiversity we see in nature is probably one of the biggest open questions in science, attracting attention from different fields, from Theoretical Ecology to Mathematics and…
We develop a set of equations to describe the population dynamics of many interacting species in food webs. Predator-prey interactions are non-linear, and are based on ratio-dependent functional responses. The equations account for…
We consider a couple of models for the dynamics of the populations of two interacting species, inspired by Lotka-Volterra's classical equations. The novelty of this work is that the interaction terms are non local and the interaction occurs…
The diversity and quality of natural systems have been a puzzle and inspiration for communities studying artificial life. It is now widely admitted that the adaptation mechanisms enabling these properties are largely influenced by the…
Natural ecosystems, in particular on the microbial scale, are inhabited by a large number of species. The population size of each species is affected by interactions of individuals with each other and by spatial and temporal changes in…
The impact of environmental fluctuation on species diversity is studied with a model of the evolutionary ecology of microorganisms. We show that environmental fluctuation induces evolutionary branching and assures the consequential…
The environment undergoes perpetual changes that are influenced by a combination of endogenous and exogenous factors. Consequently, it exerts a substantial influence on an individual's physical and psychological state, directly or…
We derive an expression for the variation between parallel trajectories in phenotypic evolution, extending the well known result that predicts the mean evolutionary path in adaptive dynamics or quantitative genetics. We show how this…
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…