When I began graduate school in the 1980s, species interactions were viewed predominantly through the prism of resource competition. Species found together were largely understood to coexist because of how they segregated their use of the available spectrum of local resources. I entered this world of ideas wholeheartedly, but I was fascinated by why prey species are able to coexist with some pr...

The origin of species richness is one of the most widely discussed questions in ecology. The absence of unified mechanistic model of competition makes difficult our deep understanding of this subject. Here we show such a two-species competition model that unifies (i) a mechanistic niche model, (ii) a mechanistic neutral (null) model and (iii) a mechanistic violation of the competitive exclusion...