Evolutionary ecology in-silico:evolving foodwebs, migrating population and speciation

We have generalized our “unified” model of evolutionary ecology by taking into account the possible movements of the organisms from one “patch” to another within the same eco-system. We model the spatial extension of the eco-system (i.e., the geography) by a square lattice where each site corresponds to a distinct “patch”. A self-organizing hierarchical food web describes the prey-predator relations in the eco-system. The same species at different patches have identical food habits but differ from each other in their reproductive characteristic features. By carrying out computer simulations up to 10 time steps, we found that, depending on the values of the set of parameters, the distribution of the lifetimes of the species can be either exponential or a combination of power laws. Some of the other features of our “unified” model turn out to be robust against migration of the organisms. PACS: 05.50, 87.23.-n, 87.10.+e Visiting from Institute for Theoretical Physics, Cologne University, D-50923 Köln, Euroland; email:[email protected] e-mail: [email protected] Corresponding author; e-mail: [email protected]