Spring Semester 2024

Coevolution at the community scale
Fernando Pedraza Perez

The coevolution of ecological communities. Communities contain direct (solid lines) and indirect (dashed lines) interactions. Such interactions can lead to coevolution, i.e., the reciprocal evolutionary change of species (differences in node colour). These evolutionary changes may, in turn, result in the establishment or loss of interactions © Fernando Pedraza Perez

Ecological interactions can result in reciprocal evolutionary change. Examples of coevolution exist across all types of species interactions. For instance, antagonism can lead to arms-race dynamics between hosts and parasites. In turn, mutualism can result in trait synchrony of plants and their pollinators. Such coevolutionary dynamics have resulted in the diversification of life and some of its major evolutionary transitions. Yet, most of our understanding of coevolution comes from the study of pairwise interactions. Thus, we ignore how coevolution operates in communities, where species are embedded in complex networks of interactions. In my PhD work, I leveraged models merging evolutionary and network theories to explore the coevolution of ecological communities. First, I studied how the structure of ecological networks affects the coevolution of species traits. Second, I explored how the nature of species interactions affects the coevolutionary dynamics of communities. Third, I assessed how coevolution modulates the structure of interactions networks and how this influences the robustness of communities to co-extinctions. Through my work I aim to understand how the ecology and evolution of communities are intertwined through the process of coevolution.

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