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

Abstract

After a brief review of our recent works on "unified" models of evolutionary ecology, we have generalized our "unified" model by taking into account spatial variations from one "patch" to another. We model the spatial extension of the ecosystem (i.e., the geography) by a square lattice where each site corresponds to a distinct "patch". A distinct self-organizing hierarchical food web describes the prey-predator relations at each patch in the ecosystem. By carrying out computer simulations up to 107 time steps, we found that, depending on the values of the set of parameters, the distribution of the lifetimes of the species can be fitted to power laws, but only over a very restricted regime of lifetimes. We also interpret our model in terms of taxonomy and present results to elucidate some evolutionary trends in genus, family, order, class, phylum, etc.