The competitive exclusion principle postulates that two trophically identical but fitness different species can not stably coexist in the same niche. However, this principle contradicts the observed nature's species richness. This fact is known as the biodiversity paradox. Here using a simple cellular automaton model we mechanistically show how two trophically identical, but fitness different s...

Communities containing species that are not niche differentiated require somemechanism to avoid the expected competitive exclusion of all but one or a few species. Predator pressure has long been held to be one of thosemechanisms. Here, we show that the critical feature of predation is not its intensity, but its degree of specialization. Neither highly specialist nor highly generalist predators...

Many cryptic species have been discovered in various taxonomic groups based on molecular phylogenetic analyses and mating experiments. Some sympatric cryptic species share equivalent resources, which contradicts the competitive exclusion principle. Two major theories have been proposed to explain the apparent lack of competitive exclusion, i.e. niche-based coexistence and neutral model, but a c...

BACKGROUND Closely related, ecologically similar species often have adjacent distributions, suggesting competitive exclusion may contribute to the structure of some natural communities. In systems such as island archipelagos, where speciation is often tightly associated with dispersal over oceanic barriers, competitive exclusion may prevent population establishment following inter-island disper...

The paradox of biological diversity is the key problem of theoretical ecology. The paradox consists in the contradiction between the competitive exclusion principle and the observed biodiversity. The principle is important as the basis for ecological theory. On a relatively simple model we show a mechanism of indefinite coexistence of complete competitors which violates the known formulations o...

We investigate the in-hospital transmission dynamics of two methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) strains: hospital-acquired methicillin resistant S. aureus (HA-MRSA) and community-acquired methicillin-resistant S. aureus (CA-MRSA). Under the assumption that patients can only be colonized with one strain of MRSA at a time, global results show that competitive exclusion occurs betwe...