Akihiko Mougi
(Department of Biology, Kyushu University)

09/2/3, 13:30 at Room 3631 (6th floor of building 3 of the Faculty of Sciences)

Theoretical studies of the evolution of communities are often based on one of two extremes, that is, pairwise or diffuse coevolution, but they seldom focus on intermediate scenarios. We used a simple food web model to analyze the coevolutionary effects of ecological invasions by a mutant and by a predator in a competing prey species community and found that ecological invasions can lead to various evolutionary histories. The invasion of a predator makes multiple evolutionary community histories possible, and the evolutionary history followed can determine both the invasion success of the predator into the native community and the fate of the community. A slight difference in the timing of an ecological invasion can lead to a greatly different fate. Finally I refer to the potential of the present graphical analysis. This approach would apply to several topics on community evolution, such as the effect of environmental shift on community evolution and the effect of invasion of alien species with different evolutionary history from a native community on community formation.

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