Coevolution of slow-fast populations: evolutionary sliding, evolutionary pseudo-equilibria and complex Red Queen dynamics.

ABSTRACT: We study the interplay of ecological and evolutionary dynamics in communities composed of populations with contrasting time-scales. In such communities, genetic variation of individual traits can cause population transitions between stationary and cyclic ecological regimes, hence abrupt variations in fitness. Such abrupt variations raise ridges in the adaptive landscape, where the populations are poised between equilibrium and cyclic coexistence and along which evolutionary trajectories can remain sliding for long times or halt at special points called evolutionary pseudo-equilibria. These novel phenomena should be generic to all systems in which ecological interactions cause fitness to vary discontinuously. They are demonstrated by the analysis of a predator-prey community, with one adapt

SUBMITTER: Dercole F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1560249 | biostudies-literature | 2006 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature