Population dynamics of generalist and specialist strategies under feast-famine cycles
Fig 2
Schematic of the population dynamics model and examples of the simulation with N = 3 and E = 2.
(A) Temporal changes in population size and nutrient levels in a single phenotype (N = 1) case. The blue line represents the population X, and the red dashed line represents the amount of nutrients S. At the time points , nutrients are supplied and S is set to S0. The feast phase (gray shaded area) begins at each nutrient supply event and ends when the supplied nutrient is exhausted by cellular consumption, after which the system enters the famine phase. At each time
, a different type of nutrient is randomly selected and supplied. The type of nutrient supplied depends on the value of environmental variables. (B) The generalist (phenotype 2) is at
; the two specialists (phenotypes 1 and 3) are symmetric at
and
, respectively. (C) The case with
. Two specialists dominate the population. (D) The case with
. The generalist dominates the population. The initial values of populations are set to unity for all three phenotypes. The parameters are set to
, and
. At each nutrient supply event, one of the two nutrient types (A or B) is chosen at random. The waiting time for the nutrient supply
follows a gamma distribution with shape and rate parameters being 2 and 50,
.