Related papers: Food Web Structure and the Evolution of Ecological…
Time evolution of number of species (genera, families, and others), population of them, and size distribution of present ones and life times are studied in terms of a new model, where population of each genetic taxon increases by a (random)…
The role of species interactions in controlling the interplay between the stability of an ecosystem and its biodiversity is still not well understood. The ability of ecological communities to recover after a small perturbation of the…
The reward system is one of the fundamental drivers of animal behaviors and is critical for survival and reproduction. Despite its importance, the problem of how the reward system has evolved is underexplored. In this paper, we try to…
Mutualistic networks have been shown to involve complex patterns of interactions among animal and plant species. The architecture of these webs seems to pervade some of their robust and fragile behaviour. Recent work indicates that there is…
We present a model for evolution and extinction in large ecosystems. The model incorporates the effects of interactions between species and the influences of abiotic environmental factors. We study the properties of the model by approximate…
Predators often consume multiple prey and by mutually subsidizing a shared predator, the prey may reciprocally harm each other. When predation levels are high, this apparent competition can culminate in a prey species being displaced.…
Complex networks often exhibit co-evolutionary dynamics, meaning that the network topology and the state of nodes or links are coupled, affecting each other in overlapping time scales. We focus on the co-evolutionary dynamics of online…
We investigate the formation of stable ecological networks where many species share the same resource. We show that such stable ecosystem naturally occurs as a result of extinctions. We obtain an analytical relation for the number of…
Recently we have introduced a simplified model of ecosystem assembly (Capitan et al., 2009) for which we are able to map out all assembly pathways generated by external invasions in an exact manner. In this paper we provide a deeper…
Food web topology and energy flow rates across food web linkages can influence ecosystem properties such as stability. Stability predictions from current models of energy flow are often sensitive to details in their formulation, and their…
A mathematical model of interacting species filling ecological niches left by the extinction of others is introduced. Species organize themselves into genera of all sizes. The size of a genus on average grows linearly with its age,…
We are interested in the impact of natural selection in a prey-predator community. We introduce an individual-based model of the community that takes into account both prey and predator phenotypes. Our aim is to understand the phenotypic…
Local coexistence of species in large ecosystems is traditionally explained within the broad framework of niche theory. However, its rationale hardly justifies rich biodiversity observed in nearly homogeneous environments. Here we consider…
We use dynamical generating functionals to study the stability and size of communities evolving in Lotka-Volterra systems with random interaction coefficients. The size of the eco-system is not set from the beginning. Instead, we start from…
We study a set of six-species ecological models where each species has two predators and two preys. On a square lattice the time evolution is governed by iterated invasions between the neighboring predator-prey pairs chosen at random and by…
We investigate the long-term web structure emerging in evolutionary food web models when different types of functional responses are used. We find that large and complex webs with several trophic layers arise only if the population dynamics…
A two-type two-sex branching process is introduced with the aim of describing the interaction of predator and prey populations with sexual reproduction and promiscuous mating. In each generation and in each species the total number of…
Predator-prey coevolution is commonly thought to result in reciprocal arms races that produce increasingly extreme and complex traits. However, such directional change is not inevitable. Here, we provide evidence for a previously…
We study the stochastic evolution of four species in cyclic competition in a well mixed environment. In systems composed of a finite number $N$ of particles these simple interaction rules result in a rich variety of extinction scenarios,…
In a complex community, species continuously adapt to each other. On rare occasions, the adaptation of a species can lead to the extinction of others, and even its own. "Adaptive dynamics" is the standard mathematical framework to describe…