Weak species in rock-paper-scissors models

TL;DR

This study explores how reducing predation or reproduction probabilities affects species coexistence and abundance in spatial rock-paper-scissors models, revealing that lower predation enhances weak species' populations, while lower reproduction has a smaller impact.

Contribution

It demonstrates that spatial structure allows coexistence in models where nonspatial versions predict instability, and quantifies how reduced predation or reproduction influences species abundance.

Findings

Reduced predation increases weak species' abundance in spatial models.

Reduced reproduction has a smaller, sometimes negative, impact on weak species.

Coexistence is possible in spatial models despite instability in nonspatial versions.

Abstract

In this letter, we investigate the population dynamics in a May-Leonard formulation of the rock-paper-scissors game in which one or two species, which we shall refer to as "weak", have a reduced predation or reproduction probability. We show that in a nonspatial model the stationary solution where all three species coexist is always unstable, while in a spatial stochastic model coexistence is possible for a wide parameter space. We find, that a reduced predation probability results in a significantly higher abundance of "weak" species, in models with either one or two "weak" species, as long as the simulation lattices are sufficiently large for coexistence to prevail. On the other hand, we show that a reduced reproduction probability has a smaller impact on the abundance of "weak" species, generally leading to a slight decrease of its population size -- the increase of the population size of one of the "weak" species being more than compensated by the reduction of the other, in the two species case. We further show that the species abundances in models where both predation and reproduction probabilities are simultaneously reduced may be accurately estimated from the results obtained considering only a reduction of either the predation or the reproduction probability.