Evolutionary substitution and replacement in \(N\)-species Lotka-Volterra systems (Q831073)

In this paper, the authors are concerned with extending certain ecological and evolutionary concepts to the case of \(N\)-species Lotka-Volterra (LV) interactions. Specifically, they are interested in finding sufficient conditions for the occurrence of evolutionary substitution (ES) and evolutionary replacement (ER) in \(N\)-species LV resident-mutant dynamical systems. The authors start by summarizing results regarding ES and ER for single species LV dynamical systems with one resident and one mutant phenotype. Next, ES for \(N\)-species LV resident-mutant systems is investigated, a single mutant phenotype being assumed to exist in exactly one species. It is shown that if the mutant can invade the \(N\)-species resident system but the resident phenotype cannot invade the ``mutant'' equilibrium with all species present, then there can be no coexistence equilibrium with all phenotypes present and ES may therefore occur. This result is then used to show that ES indeed occurs for two-species competitive systems and for general \(N\)-species LV systems when the mutant phenotype dominates the resident phenotype in the above-mentioned sense. Next, of concern is ER for \(N\)-species LV resident-mutant systems, assuming that there are exactly one resident phenotype and one mutant phenotype for each species. It is observed that the invasion conditions do not rule out the existence of a stable interior equilibrium of the resident-mutant system. Consequently, the previously obtained ES results cannot be immediately extended in order to obtain conditions for ER and the dominance concept has to be refined. It is then shown, for the particular case of two-species competitive LV systems, that ER happens if the successful invasions occur through ``historically independent replacements'' (as termed {\em ad hoc} by the authors), i.e., through a sequence of ESs whose success does not depend on the mutants first appearing in species one or in species two. The ecological significance of the concept of historically independent replacements is then discussed in the final section, its importance in explaining structural and functional features of an ecosystem being outlined.