Mobility promotes and jeopardizes biodiversity in rock–paper–scissors games

By T. Reichenbach, Mauro Mobilia, Erwin Frey. Nature, 2007

708 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Biodiversity is essential to the viability of ecological systems. Species diversity in ecosystems is promoted by cyclic, non-hierarchical interactions among competing populations. Central features of such non-transitive relations are represented by the ‘rock–paper–scissors’ game, in which rock crushes scissors, scissors cut paper, and paper wraps rock. In combination with spatial dispersal of static populations, this type of competition results in the stable coexistence of all species and the long-term maintenance of biodiversity. However, population mobility is a central feature of real ecosystems: animals migrate, bacteria run and tumble. Here, we observe a critical influence of mobility on species diversity. When mobility exceeds a certain value, biodiversity is jeopardized and lost. In contrast, below this critical threshold all subpopulations coexist and an entanglement of travelling spiral waves forms in the course of time. We establish that this phenomenon is robust; it does not depend on the details of cyclic competition or spatial environment. These findings have important implications for maintenance and temporal development of ecological systems and are relevant for the formation and propagation of patterns in microbial populations or excitable media.

Subfields: Genetics, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/84962fdbc46bc106805b93894a5b1fb3b0c70f42

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Genetics

In Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Automatic Posterior Transformation for Likelihood-Free Inference (2019, methodology): “When each species’ population density varies over a 2dimensional space, the resulting stochastic partial differential equation (SPDE) exhibits complex, dynamically shifting spatial structure (Reichenbach et al., 2007).”
Cyclic dominance in evolutionary games: a review (2014, methodology): “As by the competition among pure strategies [3], by the competition of alliances too the role of mobility (or diffusion) is likewise important.”
Evolutionary game theory: Theoretical concepts and applications to microbial communities (2010, methodology): “05, independent of the reproduction strength μ [73].”
On competitive Lotka-Volterra model in random environments (2009, background): “One possible way to incorporate this spatial structure is to consider interacting particles and stochastic partial differential equations, see, for example, [33,36,38] among many others.”
Stochastic population dynamics in spatially extended predator–prey systems (2017, methodology): “It is worth noting that δE = δD corresponds to the simplest form of movement in which an individual (or a void ∅) in l is swapped with any other individual (or ∅) in l′ [136, 137, 138, 143, 67, 145, 147, 68, 69, 70].”
Mathematical modeling of population dynamics with Allee effect (2016, background): “where η(r, t) is stochastic term, introduced additively in space and time [37,77,78].”