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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…
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…
Models in evolutionary game theory traditionally assume symmetric interactions in homogeneous environments. Here, we consider populations evolving in a heterogeneous environment, which consists of patches of different qualities that are…
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…
Ecologists have put forward many explanations for coexistence, but these are only partial explanations; nature is complex, so it is reasonable to assume that in any given ecological community, multiple mechanisms of coexistence are…
Understanding why strains with different metabolic pathways that compete for a single limiting resource coexist is a challenging issue within a theoretical perspective. Previous investigations rely on mechanisms such as group or spatial…
Species sharing a prey or a predator species may go extinct due to exploitative or apparent competition. We examine whether evolution of the shared species acts as a coexistence mechanism and to what extent the answer depends on the genetic…
Many biological populations, such as bacterial colonies, have developed through evolution a protection mechanism, called bet-hedging, to increase their probability of survival under stressful environmental fluctutation. In this context, the…
Species coexistence is a complex, multifaceted problem. At an equilibrium, coexistence requires two conditions: stability under small perturbations; and feasibility, meaning all species abundances are positive. Which of these two conditions…
Cyclic dominance between species may yield spiral waves that are known to provide a mechanism enabling persistent species coexistence. This observation holds true even in presence of spatial heterogeneity in the form of quenched disorder.…
Multiple species in the ecosystem are believed to compete cyclically for survival and thus maintain balance in nature. Stochasticity has also an inevitable role in this dynamics. Considering these attributes of nature, the stochastic…
Mutualistic interactions, which are beneficial for both interacting species, are recurrently present in ecosystems. Observations of natural systems showed that, if we draw mutualistic relationships as binary links between species, the…
We analyze the long term behavior of interacting populations which can be controlled through harvesting. The dynamics is assumed to be discrete in time and stochastic due to the effect of environmental fluctuations. We present extinction…
Aging, as defined in terms of the slope of the probability of death versus time (hazard curve), is a generic phenomenon observed in nearly all complex systems. Theoretical models of aging predict hazard curves that monotonically increase in…
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…
Organisms that exploit different environments may experience a stochastic delay in adjusting their fitness when they switch habitats. We study two species whose fitness is determined by the species composition of the local environment, as…
How diversity is maintained in natural ecosystems is a long-standing question in Theoretical Ecology. By studying a system that combines ecological dynamics, heterogeneous interactions and spatial structure, we uncover a new mechanism for…
Species coexistence is one of the central themes in modern ecology. Coexistence is a prerequisite of biological diversity. However, the question arises how biodiversity can be reconciled with the statement of competition theory, which…
Individual choices are either based on personal experience or on information provided by peers. The latter case, causes individuals to conform to the majority in their neighborhood. Such herding behavior may be very efficient in aggregating…
We study the stochastic dynamics of evolutionary games, and focus on the so-called `stochastic slowdown' effect, previously observed in (Altrock et. al, 2010) for simple evolutionary dynamics. Slowdown here refers to the fact that a…