Related papers: Heterogeneity drives plasmid maintenance in large …

Recent work draws attention to community-community encounters ("coalescence") as likely an important factor shaping natural ecosystems. This work builds on MacArthur's classic model of competitive coexistence to investigate such…

Group formation and coordination are fundamental characteristics of living systems, essential for performing tasks and ensuring survival. Interactions between individuals play a key role in group formation, and the impact of resource…

The maintenance of diversity, the `commonness of rarity', and compositional turnover are ubiquitous features of species-rich communities. Through a minimal model, we consider how these features reflect the interplay between environmental…

We consider the dynamics of spatially-distributed, diffusing populations of organisms with antagonistic interactions. These interactions are found on many length scales, ranging from kilometer-scale animal range dynamics with selection…

Microbial communities routinely have several alternative stable states observed for the same environmental parameters. Sudden and irreversible transitions between these states make external manipulation of these systems more complicated. To…

The evolution of microbial and viral organisms often generates clonal interference, a mode of competition between genetic clades within a population. In this paper, we show that interference strongly constrains the genetic and phenotypic…

We consider a reaction-diffusion model for a population structured in phenotype. We assume that the population lives in a heterogeneous periodic environment, so that a given phenotypic trait may be more or less fit according to the spatial…

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…

Ecological interactions can dramatically alter evolutionary outcomes in complex communities. Yet, the framework of population genetics largely neglects interactions from a species-rich community. Here, we bridge this gap by using dynamical…

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…

Experimental studies of microbial communities routinely reveal that they have multiple stable states. While each of these states is generally resilient, certain perturbations such as antibiotics, probiotics and diet shifts, result in…

Microbial communities are ubiquitous in nature and come in a multitude of forms, ranging from communities dominated by a handful of species to communities containing a wide variety of metabolically distinct organisms. This huge range in…

Global, population-wide oscillations in models of cyclic dominance may result in the collapse of biodiversity due to the accidental extinction of one species in the loop. Previous research has shown that such oscillations can emerge if the…

Bacteria evolve in volatile environments and complex spatial structures. Migration, fluctuations and environmental variability therefore have a significant impact on the evolution of microbial populations. Here, we consider a class of…

Herbivorous wild species constantly strive to optimize the trade-off between energy and nutrient intake and predation risk during foraging. This has led to the selection of several evolutionary traits -- such as diet, habitat selection, and…

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…

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…

To effectively forage in natural environments, organisms must adapt to changes in the quality and yield of food sources across multiple timescales. Individuals foraging in groups act based on both their private observations and the opinions…

Heterogeneity in individual characteristics and behaviour is a fundamental property of complex dynamical systems. While previous studies on evolutionary dynamics of strategies evolution in various systems have predominantly focused on the…

Mutations in a microbial population can increase the frequency of a genotype not only by increasing its exponential growth rate, but also by decreasing its lag time or adjusting the yield (resource efficiency). The contribution of multiple…