Cracking the Coexistence Code

A fascinating study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Alan Hastings, Kevin McCann, and Gabriel Gellner reveals that a classic ecological concept—the competition-colonization trade-off—can explain virtually any pattern of species abundance observed in nature.

While ecologists have long used this trade-off to explain how species coexist, testing it in the wild has been notoriously difficult because animal movement and fighting hierarchies are hard to measure. By working backward from final species counts, the team developed a simple formula proving that any assumed competitive ranking can match a set of colonization rates to produce the exact species numbers seen in the field.

The findings show that species counts alone cannot rule out this trade-off, meaning an ecosystem's strongest competitor could easily be its rarest—or its most common—species.

Read the full paper here: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=_S22RG4AAAAJ&sortby=pubdate&citation_for_view=_S22RG4AAAAJ:otzGkya1bYkC