A new hypothesis to explain the coexistence of n species in the presence of a single resource.
This paper presents a hypothesis allowing us to explain the coexistence of several species (here micro-organisms) in competition on a single resource (called a substrate) in a chemostat. We introduce a new class of kinetics that does not only depend on the substrate concentration in the medium, but also on the biomass concentration. From the study of elementary interactions (i) between micro-organisms, (ii) between micro-organisms and their environment in which they grow and from simulations, we show that this modelling approach can be interpreted in terms of substrate diffusion phenomena. A rigorous study of this new class of models allows us to hypothesize that abiotic parameters can explain the fact that an arbitrarily large number of species can coexist in the presence of a unique substrate.
Lobry
Claude
C
Projet INRIA MERE, UMR "Analyse des systèmes et biométrie", INRA, 2, place Pierre-Viala, 34060 Montpellier cedex 1, France.
Harmand
Jérôme
J
D002468:Cell Physiological Phenomena; D017753:Ecosystem; D008433:Mathematics; D008954:Models, Biological