ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Growth, death, and resource competition in sessile organisms.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Community-specific cell death sustains bacterial expansion under phosphorus starvation.Nature chemical biology · 2025Article
- Idea engines: Unifying innovation & obsolescence from markets & genetic evolution to science.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Smaller is better in competition for space.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Article
- Persistence of a sessile benthic organism promoted by a morphological strategy combining sheets and trees.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
Population-level scaling in ecological systems arises from individual growth and death with competitive constraints. We build on a minimal dynamical model of metabolic growth where the tension between individual growth and mortality determines population size distribution. We then separately include resource competition based on shared capture area. By varying rates of growth, death, and competitive attrition, we connect regular and random spatial patterns across sessile organisms from forests to ants, termites, and fairy circles. Then, we consider transient temporal dynamics in the context of asymmetric competition, such as canopy shading or large colony dominance, whose effects primarily weaken the smaller of two competitors. When such competition couples slow timescales of growth to fast competitive death, it generates population shocks and demographic oscillations similar to those observed in forest data. Our minimal quantitative theory unifies spatiotemporal patterns across sessile organisms through local competition mediated by the laws of metabolic growth, which in turn, are the result of long-term evolutionary dynamics.
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