Modeling Sympatric Speciation in Quasiperiodic Environments

Abstract

Sympatric speciation is the emergence of new species from a single ancestral species while inhabiting the same geographic region. This process presents an interesting problem for theoretical studies of evolution. One mechanism by which sympatric speciation might occur is periodic or quasiperiodic fluctuations in the abundance of the resources. In this paper inspired by the experimental findings of (Herron and Doebeli, PLoS Biol. 11, p. e1001490, 2013), we present a number of models of asexual speciation of E. coli, which range in the level of biological detail and the degree of analytical treatment. We show that coexistence of multiple species arises as a robust phenomenon, even in the presence of spatial and temporal randomness.