Competition in the gradostat (Q1102231)

The chemostat is a model ecosystem, representing a simple lake, where competition can be studied experimentally, computationally, and analytically. A constant concentration of all the nutrients needed by a microorganism are pumped at a constant rate into a culture vessel whose volume is fixed. A concatenation of chemostats - called a gradostat - consists of several chemostats in which the adjacent vessels are connected. In this paper competition in the gradostat is studied for the case of two vessels and two populations. This gradostat is derived from the principles of the chemostat. The mathematical arguments presented are a combination of computational ones and geometric ones utilizing the theory of competitive and cooperative systems. To see whether the presence of a nutrient gradient can alter the competitive exclusion principle which holds in a well mixed chemostat, is the basic point in analyzing the gradostat. The principal result of this paper is that this is indeed the case. The possible outcomes of two populations competing in a gradostat are determined as a function of the two basic parameters of the organism, the maximal growth rate and the Michaelis-Menten constant. One of the possibilities is coexistence. Numerical experiments indicate that the region for coexistence is quite delicate in the two vessel case.