Related papers: Can a rudderless species survive?
All of the known circumbinary planets are large (> 3 Earth radii). Whilst observational biases may account for this dearth of small planets, in this paper we propose a theoretical explanation. Most of the known planets are near the…
Evolution and learning are two of the fundamental mechanisms by which life adapts in order to survive and to transcend limitations. These biological phenomena inspired successful computational methods such as evolutionary algorithms and…
Sex is considered as an evolutionary paradox, since its evolutionary advantage does not necessarily overcome the two fold cost of sharing half of one's offspring's genome with another member of the population. Here we demonstrate that…
Geographic isolation is a central mechanism of speciation, but perfect isolation of populations is rare. Although speciation can be hindered if gene flow is large, intermediate levels of migration can enhance speciation by introducing…
How should dispersal strategies be chosen to increase the likelihood of survival of a species? We obtain the answer for the spatially extended versions of three well-known models of two competing species with unequal diffusivities. Though…
In marine plankton, many swimming species can perceive their environment with flow sensors. Can they use this flow information to travel faster in turbulence? To address this question, we consider plankters swimming at constant speed, whose…
We consider an exactly solvable model of branching random walk with random selection, which describes the evolution of a population with $N$ individuals on the real line. At each time step, every individual reproduces independently, and its…
We investigate a basic immigration process where colonies grow, during a random time, according to a general counting process until collapse. Upon collapse a random amount of individuals survive. These survivors try independently…
The ways in which natural selection can allow the proliferation of cooperative behavior have long been seen as a central problem in evolutionary biology. Most of the literature has focused on interactions between pairs of individuals and on…
The theory of evolution states that the diversity of species can be explained by descent with modification. Therefore, all living beings are related through a common ancestor. This evolutionary process must have left traces in our molecular…
By introducing the notions of living and dead nodes a new model of random tree evolution with continuous time parameter has been constructed. It is assumed that two random variables, the lifetime and the offspring number of living nodes…
There have been extensive studies of a random walk among a field of immobile traps (or obstacles), where one is interested in the probability of survival as well as the law of the random walk conditioned on its survival up to time $t$. In…
Transposons are small, self-replicating DNA sequences found in every branch of life. Often, one transposon will parasitize another, forming a tiny intracellular ecosystem. In some species these ecosystems thrive, while in others they go…
We consider stochastic growth models to represent population subject to catastrophes. We analyze the subject from different set ups considering or not spatial restrictions, whether dispersion is a good strategy to increase the population…
Ecological connectivity is critical for population dynamics but in many benthic species it is complicated by a planktonic larval phase, whose dispersal remains poorly understood. Using a plankton pump, we examine the distribution of…
Metapopulation theory for a long time has assumed dispersal to be symmetric, i.e. patches are connected through migrants dispersing bi-directionally without a preferred direction. However, for natural populations symmetry is often broken,…
We present detailed numerical simulations of the evolution of Tidal Dwarf Galaxies (TDGs) after they kinematically decouple from the rest of the tidal arm to investigate their survivability. Both the short-term (500 Myr) response of TDGs to…
Zooplankton live in dynamic environments where turbulence may challenge their limited swimming abilities. How this interferes with fundamental behavioral processes remains elusive. We reconstruct simultaneously the trajectories of flow…
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 this letter we study the full semi-conservative treatment of a model for the co-evolution of a virus and an adaptive immune system. Regions of viability are calculated for both conservatively and semi-conservatively replicating viruses…