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Interactive effects of builders and exploiters on environmental quality and the outcome of competition between the two
- Source :
- Journal of Theoretical Biology. 249:46-57
- Publication Year :
- 2007
- Publisher :
- Elsevier BV, 2007.
-
Abstract
- The implications of spatial and temporal structure for the maintenance of mutualism, altruism, and niche construction or ecosystem engineering have been explored by many theoretical models. Part of what these models have shown is that organisms that give up some amount of potential short-term gain in order to improve the quality of their environment can, in a variety of scenarios, persist in the face of more exploitative competitors if structure in environmental quality allows the former to preferentially benefit from their investments. The models presented here consider the additional implications of interactions between competitors in their effects on their environment (recently documented in multiple systems). Relative to when competitor types were additive, synergistic effects promoted coexistence and antagonistic effects promoted founder effects (but favored the less exploitative type when both had equal initial frequencies). Spatial and temporal patterns of patch quality and occupancy also differed markedly between scenarios, even where all three scenarios generated the same qualitative outcome. These models show that understanding both the scale over which organisms affect their environment and the degree to which organisms interact in such effects are important for interpreting patterns in environmental quality, predicting the effects of organism-environment feedback on competition, and explaining the persistence of mutualistic traits.
- Subjects :
- Statistics and Probability
Competitive Behavior
Deception
Occupancy
Theoretical models
Biology
Models, Biological
General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
Microeconomics
Animals
Computer Simulation
Ecosystem
Social Behavior
Environmental quality
Stochastic Processes
Behavior, Animal
General Immunology and Microbiology
business.industry
Applied Mathematics
Environmental resource management
General Medicine
Competitor analysis
Altruism
Biological Evolution
Niche construction
Interactive effects
Modeling and Simulation
Mutualism (economic theory)
General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
business
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 00225193
- Volume :
- 249
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Journal of Theoretical Biology
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....91a10cca4cb49f172927f222d535d474