Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2016

Description

Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. We developed an agent-based computer model of an ecosystem to predict interactions of competition and predation. In our simulations of the model, the effects of the ‘Gause law’ emerged as the results of population fluctuations and a large number of stochastic events. Small biases in life history parameters produced strong effects through the interactions of positive feedback with the population fluctuations. In a low-production environment, the smaller and faster consumer outcompetes the larger and slower one, but in a high production environment the larger and slower consumer survives. Predation hastens the extinction of one of the consumers, but niche partitioning of the consumers increases both the coexistence of consumers and the number of predators. Predators with medium efficiency are able to coexist in the system longer and in larger numbers. Besides the ecological insights this model provides, we conclude that agent-based simulations are very effective tools to explore the interactions between predation and competition interactions.

Copyright Statement

© 2016 the author(s). Published by informa UK Limited, trading as taylor & Francis Group.this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Copyright (c) 2016 Author(s)

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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