Community structures in allelopathic interaction networks: an eco-evolutionary approach

Abstract

Nowadays, evidence is mounting that the race of living organisms for adaptation to the chemicals synthesized by their neighbours may drive community structures. Particularly, some bacterial infections and plant invasions disruptive of the native community rely on the release of allelochemicals that inhibit or kill sensitive strains or individuals from their own or other species. In this report, an eco-evolutionary model for community assembly through resource competition, allelophatic interactions, and evolutionary branching is presented and studied by numerical analysis. Our major findings are that stable communities with increasing biodiversity can emerge at weak allelopathic suppression, but stronger allelophaty is negatively correlated with community diversity. In the former regime the allelopathic interaction networks exhibit Gaussian degree distributions, while in the later one the network degrees are Weibull distributed.