A study on interspecific competition: How interaction between two competing populations of species affects their persistence.

Introduction

Competitive interactions between species have long been a topic of interest to ecologists (Goldberg & Barton 1992). They are especially interested in how competitive interactions influence the structure of natural communities and their abilities to evolve competitive abilities (Goldberg & Barton 1992).

Competition is often responsible for the natural distribution of species, as one species will move away from an area where another species with similar requirements occur, since there is a clash in the resources they use (Connell 1961, Tilman 1987).

Other factors that influence the distribution of species and interspecific competition are weather, predation, intraspecific competition, disturbances and the characteristics of the competing species themselves (Connell 1983). The aim of this study was to see how the characteristics of competing species affect the outcomes of competitive interaction. What happens when values for initial abundance and alpha values are increased?

Methods and materials

A model was built in Vensim to represent two imaginary interacting populations. To incorporate the effects of the one species on the other, the following Lotka-Volterra (Begon et al. 2009) equations were used:

Effect of species 2 on species 1: dN1/dt= r1N1 ((K1- [N1+α12N2])/N1)

Effect of species 1 on species 2: dN2/dt= r2N2 ((K2- [N2+α21N1])/N1)

Where N is the number of individuals in the population, K is the carrying capacity, α12 is the effect of species 2 on species 1, α21 is the effect of species 1 on species 2 and r is the rate of intrinsic increase (Begon et al. 2009).

The initial values used for the parameters were: r1= r2=0,1 ; N1=N2= 50 ; K1=K2= 100 ; α12= 0,5 ; α21= 0

To see whether these results are accurate, a ...

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