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 do not exceed the number of resources. In particular, very high diversity can only be observed for linear tradeoffs.
Highlights
Life on Earth is spectacularly diverse (May, 1988)
To make the argument for the relevance of non-linear tradeoffs even more solid, we prove that an omnipresent non-linearity in the dependence of nutrient uptake rates on a can be transformed into the non-linearity of tradeoff (Equation 1), and vice versa
Tradeoffs in the rates of uptake of different resources were suggested as a mechanism to generate large amounts of diversity (Posfai et al, 2017; Erez et al, 2020), possibly solving the ‘paradox of the plankton’ (Hutchinson, 1961), and violating the competitive exclusion principle (Hardin, 1960), which states that the number of coexisting species should not exceed the number of resources
Summary
Life on Earth is spectacularly diverse (May, 1988). For example, one study in the early 2000s found that the number of species of fungi is, by a conservative estimate, ca. 1.5 million (Hawksworth, 2001), which was subsequently revised to be between 2.2 and 3.8 million species (Hawksworth and Lucking, 2017). As in the previous examples, in the initial phase the monomorphic population evolves close to the singular point aà In this case, the singular point is again an evolutionary branching point giving rise to the emergence of distinct and diverging phenotypic clusters (Figure 3(b)). Once evolution has come to its steady state, resulting in a single generalist species when g>1 or p specialist species when g
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