Ecological Effects of Cyclically Fluctuating Resources

摘要

In nature, the resources available to organisms in an ecosystem fluctuate regularly due to abiotic factors like weather patterns and seasonality, and are also impacted by humans. The effects of resource fluctuation or stability have been studied in real ecosystems at small physical and temporal scale because of physical and temporal constraints on researchers. In order to study these phenomena at much larger scales, we employ EcoSim, an individual-based predator-prey ecosystem model designed for investigating ecological and evolutionary phenomena at very large scales. In this paper, we modified EcoSim such that resources available to prey fluctuate cyclically, so that we can observe the behavioral, population-wide, and evolutionary impacts of cyclically fluctuating resources. The runs have computed 2000 time-steps, and our goal is to have 20000 time-steps in order to observe evolutionary consequences. We can already observe several effects of resource fluctuations. We observe oscillations in reproductive success and failures, energy spent per time-step per individual, population sizes, and compactness, that are all synchronized with the fluctuations in resources.