Ecological conditions determine extinction risk in co-evolving bacteria-phage populations

Migration enhances adaptation in bacteriophage populations evolving in ecological sinks.

Migration between populations can be a major evolutionary force. However, some disagreement exists as to precisely how migration affects population adaptation. Some theories emphasize the inhibitory effects of gene flow between locally adapted populations, whereas others propose that migration can enhance adaptation. Migration has also been theorized to rescue sink populations from extinction. ...

Credit Assignment Among Neurons in Co-evolving Populations

Different credit assignment strategies are investigated in a two level co-evolutionary model which involves a population of Gaussian neurons and a population of radial basis function networks consisting of neurons from the neuron population. Each individual in neuron population can contribute to one or more networks in network population, so there is a two-fold difficulty in evaluating the effe...

Ecological Consequences of Extinction Ecological Consequences of Extinction

Extinction conditions for isolated populations affected by environmental stochasticity.

We determine the critical patch size below which extinction occurs for populations living in one-dimensional habitats surrounded by completely hostile environments in the presence of environmental fluctuations. The population dynamics is reformulated in terms of a stochastic reaction-diffusion equation and is reduced to a deterministic equation that incorporates the systematic contributions of ...

Localization and extinction of bacterial populations under inhomogeneous growth conditions.

The transition from localized to systemic spreading of bacteria, viruses, and other agents is a fundamental problem that spans medicine, ecology, biology, and agriculture science. We have conducted experiments and simulations in a simple one-dimensional system to determine the spreading of bacterial populations that occurs for an inhomogeneous environment under the influence of external convect...