A food-web based unified model of "macro"- and "micro-" evolution

TL;DR

This paper presents a unified food-web based model that captures both micro-evolutionary processes like individual birth and death, and macro-evolutionary phenomena such as speciation and extinction within a hierarchical framework.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive theoretical model integrating detailed individual-level dynamics with large-scale evolutionary patterns in food webs.

Findings

Species lifetime distribution follows an approximate power law in limited regimes.

The model unifies micro- and macro-evolutionary processes within a single hierarchical food-web framework.

Provides insights into the interplay between individual interactions and species-level evolution.

Abstract

We incorporate the generic hierarchical architecture of foodwebs into a "{\it unified}" model that describes both "micro" and "macro" evolutions within a single theoretical framework. This model describes the "micro" -evolution in detail by accounting for the birth, ageing and natural death of individual organisms as well as prey-predator interactions on a hierarchical dynamic food web. It also provides a natural description of random mutations and speciation/orgination of species as well as their extinctions. The distribution of lifetimes of species follows an approximate power law only over a limited regime.