Evolution of diversity in metabolic strategies

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Abstract

Understanding the origin and maintenance of biodiversity is a fundamental problem. Many theoretical approaches have been investigating ecological interactions, such as competition, as potential drivers of diversification. Classical consumer-resource models predict that the number of coexisting species should not exceed the number of distinct resources, a phenomenon known as the competitive exclusion principle. It has recently been argued that including physiological tradeoffs in consumer-resource models can lead to violations of this principle and to ecological coexistence of very high numbers of species. Here we show that these results crucially depend on the functional form of the tradeoff. We investigate the evolutionary dynamics of resource use constrained by tradeoffs and show that if the tradeoffs are non-linear, the system either does not diversify, or diversifies into a number of coexisting species that does not exceed the number of resources. In particular, very high diversity can only be observed for linear tradeoffs.

Data availability

All data generated or analysed during this study are obtained through the codes which have been deposited in https://github.com/jaros007/Codes_for_Evolution_of_diversity_in_metabolic_strategies

Article and author information

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Rodrigo Caetano

Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal do Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil

For correspondence
caetano@fisica.ufpr.br

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-2837-113X
Yaroslav Ispolatov

Departamento de Fisica, Universidad de Santiago de Chile, Santiago, Chile

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-0201-3396
Michael Doebeli

Department of Zoology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

Competing interests
Michael Doebeli, Reviewing Editor, eLife.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-5975-5710

Funding

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.