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  • The emergence of new trophic levels in eco-evolutionary models with naturally-bounded traits

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    Accepted Manuscript (AM)
    Author(s)
    Cropp, Roger
    Norbury, John
    Griffith University Author(s)
    Cropp, Roger A.
    Year published
    2020
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    Abstract
    Ecosystems and food webs are structured into trophic levels of who eats whom. Species that occupy higher trophic levels have less available energy and higher energetic costs than species at lower trophic levels. So why do higher trophic levels exist? What processes generate new trophic levels? We consider a heuristic eco-evolutionary model based on simple Lotka-Volterra equations, where the evolution of traits is described by a generalisation of Lande's equation. The transition from competition to predation in this simplest of models is a successful, safe strategy for a population, and suggests a propensity to develop new ...
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    Ecosystems and food webs are structured into trophic levels of who eats whom. Species that occupy higher trophic levels have less available energy and higher energetic costs than species at lower trophic levels. So why do higher trophic levels exist? What processes generate new trophic levels? We consider a heuristic eco-evolutionary model based on simple Lotka-Volterra equations, where the evolution of traits is described by a generalisation of Lande's equation. The transition from competition to predation in this simplest of models is a successful, safe strategy for a population, and suggests a propensity to develop new trophic levels may be an inherent property of ecosystems. Numerical simulations with a more complex eco-evolutionary model of interacting plant and herbivore populations display the emergence of a new trophic level as an alternative to continued competition. These simulations reveal that new trophic levels may arise naturally from ecosystems because a robust strategy for a population in the presence of a strong competitor that could dominate or potentially extinguish them, is to predate upon the competitor. The same properties that make the competitor strong make it an ideal prey, suggesting the rubric that it is better to eat a strong competitor than to continue competing.
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    Journal Title
    Journal of Theoretical Biology
    Volume
    496
    DOI
    https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2020.110264
    Copyright Statement
    © 2020 Elsevier. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, providing that the work is properly cited.
    Subject
    Mathematical sciences
    Biological sciences
    Science & Technology
    Life Sciences & Biomedicine
    Biology
    Mathematical & Computational Biology
    Life Sciences & Biomedicine - Other Topics
    Publication URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/10072/398944
    Collection
    • Journal articles

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