Do you like comics? I am a comics fan, majorly favoring Japanese comics and some Chinese comics with the rise of Chinese comics industry in recent years. Why do I mention this? I mean to say drawings are usually the most straight way to express abstract ideas. This is why I want to show an animation of our model to explain such complex mechanism instead of using tons of papers filled with equations.
An animation of trait-population coevolution for a single attraction
We have constructed a mathematical model to describe how traits of species interplay with their abundance under environmental adaptation and competition along a phylogenetic tree. For simplicity, we assume one attraction in the community that pull traits evolve toward one single optimum trait that better utilize natural resource. In this model, population dynamics weight the species’ competitive power, i.e. the species with large population size gains more competitive power. We would like to see what kind of trait pattern under such mechanism. The animation below shows how it works along a given phylogenetic tree.