No Arabic abstract
This work deals with the effects of an apex predator on the cyclic competition among three distinct species that follow the rules of the rock-paper-scissors game. The investigation develops standard stochastic simulations but is motivated by a novel procedure which is explained in the work. We add the apex predator as the fourth species in the system that contains three species that evolve following the standard rules of migration, reproduction and predation, and study how the system evolves in this new environment, in comparison with the case in the absence of the apex predator. The results show that the apex predator engenders the tendency to spread uniformly in the lattice, contributing to destroy the spiral patterns, keeping biodiversity but diminishing the average size of the clusters of the species that compete cyclically.
Rock-paper-scissors (RPS) game is a nice model to study the biodiversity in ecosystem. However, the previous studies only consider the nearest- neighbor- interaction among the species. In this paper, taking the long range migration into account, the effects of the interplay between nearest-neighbor-interaction and long-range-interaction of Levy flight obey the power law distance distribution with the exponent h (-0.3<h<-0.1) in spatial RPS game is investigated. Taking the probability of long range Levy flight and the power exponent as parameters, the coexistence conditions of three species are found. The critical curves for stable coexistence of three species in the parameters space are presented. It is also found that long-range-interaction with Levy flight has interesting effects on the final spatiotemporal pattern of the system. The results reveal that the long-range-interaction of Levy flight exhibit pronounced effects on biodiversity of ecosystem.
In this letter, we investigate the population dynamics in a May-Leonard formulation of the rock-paper-scissors game in which one or two species, which we shall refer to as weak, have a reduced predation or reproduction probability. We show that in a nonspatial model the stationary solution where all three species coexist is always unstable, while in a spatial stochastic model coexistence is possible for a wide parameter space. We find, that a reduced predation probability results in a significantly higher abundance of weak species, in models with either one or two weak species, as long as the simulation lattices are sufficiently large for coexistence to prevail. On the other hand, we show that a reduced reproduction probability has a smaller impact on the abundance of weak species, generally leading to a slight decrease of its population size -- the increase of the population size of one of the weak species being more than compensated by the reduction of the other, in the two species case. We further show that the species abundances in models where both predation and reproduction probabilities are simultaneously reduced may be accurately estimated from the results obtained considering only a reduction of either the predation or the reproduction probability.
We perform individual-based Monte Carlo simulations in a community consisting of two predator species competing for a single prey species, with the purpose of studying biodiversity stabilization in this simple model system. Predators are characterized with predation efficiency and death rates, to which Darwinian evolutionary adaptation is introduced. Competition for limited prey abundance drives the populations optimization with respect to predation efficiency and death rates. We study the influence of various ecological elements on the final state, finding that both indirect competition and evolutionary adaptation are insufficient to yield a stable ecosystem. However, stable three-species coexistence is observed when direct interaction between the two predator species is implemented.
We investigate the impact of parity on the abundance of weak species in the context of the simplest generalization of the rock-paper-scissors model to an arbitrary number of species -- we consider models with a total number of species ($N_S$) between 3 and 12, having one or more (weak) species characterized by a reduced predation probability (by a factor of ${mathcal P}_w$ with respect to the other species). We show, using lattice based spatial stochastic simulations with random initial conditions, large enough for coexistence to prevail, that parity effects are significant. We find that the performance of weak species is dependent on whether the total number of species is even or odd, especially for $N_S le 8$, with odd numbers of species being on average more favourable to weak species than even ones. We further show that, despite the significant dispersion observed among individual models, a weak species has on average a higher abundance than a strong one if ${mathcal P}_w$ is sufficiently smaller than unity -- the notable exception being the four species case.
The spatio-temporal arrangement of interacting populations often influences the maintenance of species diversity and is a subject of intense research. Here, we study the spatio-temporal patterns arising from the cyclic competition between three species in two dimensions. Inspired by recent experiments, we consider a generic metapopulation model comprising rock-paper-scissors interactions via dominance removal and replacement, reproduction, mutations, pair-exchange and hopping of individuals. By combining analytical and numerical methods, we obtain the models phase diagram near its Hopf bifurcation and quantitatively characterize the properties of the spiraling patterns arising in each phase. The phases characterizing the cyclic competition away far from the Hopf bifurcation (at low mutation rate) are also investigated. Our analytical approach relies on the careful analysis of the properties of the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation derived through a controlled (perturbative) multiscale expansion around the models Hopf bifurcation. Our results allows us to clarify when spatial rock-paper-scissors competition leads to stable spiral waves and under which circumstances they are influenced by nonlinear mobility.