Coevolution Maintains Diversity in the Stochastic "Kill the Winner" Model

Abstract

The "Kill the Winner" hypothesis is an attempt to address the problem of diversity in biology. It argues that host-specific predators control the population of each prey, preventing a winner from emerging and thus maintaining the coexistence of all species in the system. We develop a stochastic model for the "Kill the Winner" paradigm and show that the stable coexistence state of the deterministic "Kill the Winner" model is destroyed by demographic stochasticity, through a cascade of extinction events. We formulate an individual-level stochastic model in which predator-prey coevolution promotes high diversity of the ecosystem by generating a persistent population flux of species.

References in corpus (8)

• Predator-prey cycles from resonant amplification of demographic stochasticity
• Robust ecological pattern formation induced by demographic noise
• Fluctuation-driven Turing patterns
• Demographic noise can reverse the direction of deterministic selection
• Population oscillations in spatial stochastic Lotka-Volterra models: A field-theoretic perturbational analysis
• Multiple extinction routes in stochastic population models
• Path integral calculation for emergence of rapid evolution from demographic stochasticity
• Limit Cycles Sparked by Mutation in the Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Dynamical mean-field theory: from ecosystems to reaction networks
• Overcome Competitive Exclusion in Ecosystems
• Delays in fitness adjustment can lead to coexistence of hierarchically interacting species
• Enzyme regulation and mutation in a model serial dilution ecosystem
• Invasion and Interaction Determine Population Composition in an Open Evolving System
• Mechanisms promoting biodiversity in ecosystems
• A minimal model of pan-immunity maintenance by horizontal gene transfer in the ecological dynamics of bacteria and phages
• Self-organized biodiversity in biotic resource systems
• Emerging Diversity in a Population of Evolving Intransitive Dice
• Interspecific information use facilitates species coexistence in ecosystems