Revising the Role of Species Mobility in Maintaining Biodiversity in Communities with Cyclic Competition

One of the most crucial tasks faced by biologists today is revealing the mechanisms which account for biodiversity, yet we are still far from a full understanding of these mechanisms, and in particular the role of spatially heterogeneous population distributions. Recently, the spatially heterogeneous coexistence seen in cyclic competition models—in which species compete as in the game rock-paper-scissors—has brought them to the fore as a paradigm for biodiversity. Research into cyclic competition has so far been focused almost exclusively on stochastic lattice models with discrete space, which ignore several key dynamical aspects. In particular, such models usually assume that species disperse at the same speed. This paper aims to extend our understanding of cyclic competition by applying a reaction–diffusion Lotka–Volterra scheme to the problem, which allows us to vary the mobility of each species, and lets us take into account cyclic competition with more complex underlying mechanisms. In this paper we reveal an entirely new kind of cyclic competition—‘conditional’ cyclic competition, with a different underlying mechanism to ‘classic’ cyclic competition—and we show that biodiversity in communities with cyclic competition in fact depends heavily on the ratios between the species mobilities. Furthermore, we show that this dependence can be completely different for conditional and classic cyclic competition. We also present a wide range of spatiotemporal patterns which are formed in the system, including spiral and target waves, spiralling patches, and irregular chaotic patches. We show that the previously unknown case of conditional cyclic competition is host to a scenario of patchy co-invasion, where the spread of the population front takes place via the formation, splitting and propagation of patches of high species density. This is also an example of invasional meltdown because one competitor facilitates the invasion of the other, but unlike well-known cases of invasional meltdown the co-invaders in this system are not mutualists but antagonistic competitors, and the overall result mitigates, rather than amplifies, the damage done to the native ecosystem.

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