Related papers: Modeling cooperation and competition in biological…
In this paper we consider a microscopic model of a simple ecosystem. The basic ingredients of this model are individuals, and both the phenotypic and genotypic levels are taken in account. The model is based on a long range cellular…
Persistent economic competition is often justified as a mechanism of innovation, efficiency, and welfare maximization. Yet empirical evidence across disciplines reveals that competition systematically generates fragility, inequality, and…
Cooperation is central to the organization of complex biological and social systems. Most theoretical models assume homogeneous environments; in reality, populations inhabit spatially varying landscapes in which the payoffs of cooperation…
The evolution of cooperation often depends upon population structure, yet nearly all models of cooperation implicitly assume that this structure remains static. This is a simplifying assumption, because most organisms possess genetic traits…
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…
Fluctuating environments are situations where the spatio-temporal stochasticity plays a significant role in the evolutionary dynamics. The study of the evolution of cooperation in these environments typically assumes a homogeneous, well…
The sampling of interaction partners depends on often implicit modelling assumptions, yet has marked effects on the dynamics in evolutionary games. One particularly important aspect is whether or not competitors also interact. Population…
In biology, the evolution of increasingly cooperative groups has shaped the history of life. Genes collaborate in the control of cells; cells efficiently divide tasks to produce cohesive multicellular individuals; individual members of…
In order to understand the role of space in ecological communities where each species produces a certain type of resource and has varying abilities to exploit the resources produced by its own species and by the other species, we carry out…
Species introductions to new habitats can cause a decline in the population size of competing native species and consequently also in their genetic diversity. We are interested in why these adverse effects are weak in some cases whereas in…
Many organisms live in populations structured by space and by class, exhibit plastic responses to their social partners, and are subject to non-additive ecological and fitness effects. Social evolution theory has long recognized that all of…
Explaining the wide range of dynamics observed in ecological communities is challenging due to the large number of species involved, the complex network of interactions among them, and the influence of multiple environmental variables.…
We study the effect of speciation, i.e. the introduction of new species through evolution into communities, in the setting of predator-prey systems. Predator-prey dynamics is classically well modeled by Lotka-Volterra equations, also when…
Environmental variation can play an important role in ecological competition by influencing the relative advantage between competing species. Here, we consider such effects by extending a classical, competitive Moran model to incorporate an…
In the last years, a remarkable theoretical effort has been made in order to understand stability and complexity in ecological communities. The non-random structures of real ecological interaction networks has been recognized as one key…
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…
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…
Microbial ecosystems are commonly modeled by fixed interactions between species in steady exponential growth states. However, microbes often modify their environments so strongly that they are forced out of the exponential state into…
Ecosystems, which are intricate amalgams of biological communities and their surrounding environments, continually evolve under the influence of their myriad interactions. The world is currently facing intensifying environmental…
If one isolated species is supposed to evolve following the logistic mapping, then we are tempted to think that the dynamics of two species can be expressed by a coupled system of two discrete logistic equations. As three basic…