Unified “micro”- and “macro-” evolution of eco-systems: self-organization of a dynamic network

Abstract

Very recently we have developed a dynamic network model for eco-systems that achieved "unification" of "micro" and "macro"-evolution. We now propose an extension of our model so as to stabilize the eco-system and describe speciation in a more realistic manner.

Evolutionary ecologyin silico: Does mathematical modelling help in understanding ‘generic’ trends?

“…Field studies and laboratory experiments have convincingly established that evolutionary changes can take place in ecosystems over relatively short ecological time scales [116,117,118,119,120,121,122]. Motivated by these observations and because of the availability of sufficiently fast computers, several "unified" models of evolutionary ecology have been developed over the last few years [129,130,131,132,134,135,136,137]. All of these models treat an ecosystem as a dynamically evolving network of species.…”

“…In our works [129,130,131,132,134], we have provided the most detailed description of the ecological as well as the evolutionary processes. We have incorporated not only the hierarchical architecture of the natural food webs in a simplified manner but also the emergence of this architecture through self-organization as well as the possibility of migration of populations from one "patch" to another of the same eco-system for predation or merely for occupying a habitat.…”

Evolving eco-system: a network of networks

“…Because of the various known limitations of the available fossil data, it is questionable whether real extinctions follow power laws and, if so, over how many orders of magnitude. In summary, we have extended the most recent version of our model "unified" model of evolutionary ecology [9,10,11,12,13], formulated as a network of networks, by incorporating predator-prey interactions among species on neighbouring spatial patches. This improvement does not alter the qualitative features of the statistics of extinctions in our "unified" model.…”

“…Thus, the eco-system can be modelled as a network of networks (see Fig.1). As in our earlier papers [10,11,12,13], we assume a generic hierarchical architecture of the food web, where niches are arranged in different trophic levels ℓ (1 ≤ ℓ ≤ ℓ max ), with no more than m ℓ−1 nodes in each level (m is a positive integer). Species in level ℓ can prey on (or ignore) species on the immediately lower level ℓ + 1.…”

“…But, recent experimental evidences [6,7,8] have established that significant evolutionary changes can occur over ecologically relevant time scales. Motivated by these experiments, we have developed models [9,10,11,12,13] of evolutionary ecology from the perspective of dynamic networks. In these models, in addition to the intra-node dynamics, which corresponds to population dynamics of species, the entire network itself changes slowly with time to capture evolutionary processes.…”