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Speciation, Diversification, and Coexistence of Sessile Species That Compete for Space
Speciation, diversification, and competition between species challenge the stability of complex ecosystems. Laboratory experiments often focus on one or two species competing under conditions where they may grow exponentially. Field studies, in contrast, emphasize multi-species communities character...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Public Library of Science
2014
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4018333/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24819515 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0096665 |
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author | Mitarai, Namiko Heinsalu, Els Sneppen, Kim |
author_facet | Mitarai, Namiko Heinsalu, Els Sneppen, Kim |
author_sort | Mitarai, Namiko |
collection | PubMed |
description | Speciation, diversification, and competition between species challenge the stability of complex ecosystems. Laboratory experiments often focus on one or two species competing under conditions where they may grow exponentially. Field studies, in contrast, emphasize multi-species communities characterized by many types of ecological interactions. A general problem is to understand conditions that support a dynamically maintained coexistence of many species in an ecosystem over a long time span. In the present paper we propose a lattice model of multiple competing and evolving sessile species. When allowing the interspecies interactions to mutate, we obtain coexistence of many species in a complex ecosystem, provided that there is a cost for each interaction. The diversity reached by the model incorporating speciation is found to be substantially higher than in the case when entirely new species appear due to immigration from outside of the considered ecosystem. The species self-organize their spatial distribution through competitive interactions to create many patches, implicitly protecting each other from competitively superior species, and speciation in each patch leads the system to high diversity. We also show that species that exist a long time tend to have a relatively small population, as this allows them to avoid encounter with competitive invaders. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4018333 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2014 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-40183332014-05-16 Speciation, Diversification, and Coexistence of Sessile Species That Compete for Space Mitarai, Namiko Heinsalu, Els Sneppen, Kim PLoS One Research Article Speciation, diversification, and competition between species challenge the stability of complex ecosystems. Laboratory experiments often focus on one or two species competing under conditions where they may grow exponentially. Field studies, in contrast, emphasize multi-species communities characterized by many types of ecological interactions. A general problem is to understand conditions that support a dynamically maintained coexistence of many species in an ecosystem over a long time span. In the present paper we propose a lattice model of multiple competing and evolving sessile species. When allowing the interspecies interactions to mutate, we obtain coexistence of many species in a complex ecosystem, provided that there is a cost for each interaction. The diversity reached by the model incorporating speciation is found to be substantially higher than in the case when entirely new species appear due to immigration from outside of the considered ecosystem. The species self-organize their spatial distribution through competitive interactions to create many patches, implicitly protecting each other from competitively superior species, and speciation in each patch leads the system to high diversity. We also show that species that exist a long time tend to have a relatively small population, as this allows them to avoid encounter with competitive invaders. Public Library of Science 2014-05-12 /pmc/articles/PMC4018333/ /pubmed/24819515 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0096665 Text en © 2014 Mitarai et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Mitarai, Namiko Heinsalu, Els Sneppen, Kim Speciation, Diversification, and Coexistence of Sessile Species That Compete for Space |
title | Speciation, Diversification, and Coexistence of Sessile Species That Compete for Space |
title_full | Speciation, Diversification, and Coexistence of Sessile Species That Compete for Space |
title_fullStr | Speciation, Diversification, and Coexistence of Sessile Species That Compete for Space |
title_full_unstemmed | Speciation, Diversification, and Coexistence of Sessile Species That Compete for Space |
title_short | Speciation, Diversification, and Coexistence of Sessile Species That Compete for Space |
title_sort | speciation, diversification, and coexistence of sessile species that compete for space |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4018333/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24819515 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0096665 |
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