A mechanistic verification of the competitive exclusion principle

TL;DR

This paper introduces a mechanistic model demonstrating how multiple species can coexist on a single resource, challenging the traditional competitive exclusion principle through soliton-like population waves.

Contribution

It presents a novel, white-box cellular automata model showing indefinite coexistence of multiple species, providing a new formulation of the competitive exclusion principle.

Findings

Multiple species can coexist indefinitely on a single resource.

Population waves exhibit soliton-like behavior enabling coexistence.

The model challenges and refines the traditional competitive exclusion principle.

Abstract

Biodiversity conservation becoming increasingly urgent. It is important to find mechanisms of competitive coexistence of species with different fitness in especially difficult circumstances - on one limiting resource, in isolated stable uniform habitat, without any trade-offs and cooperative interactions. Here we show a mechanism of competitive coexistence based on a soliton-like behaviour of population waves. We have modelled it by the logical axiomatic deterministic individual-based cellular automata method. Our mechanistic models of population and ecosystem dynamics are of white-box type and so they provide direct insight into mechanisms under study. The mechanism provides indefinite coexistence of two, three and four competing species. This mechanism violates the known formulations of the competitive exclusion principle. As a consequence, we have proposed a fully mechanistic and most stringent formulation of the principle.