Fig 1.
Example of a self-organized size distribution of species predicted by a generic model of competition and evolution along a hypothetical niche axis [13].
Evolutionary self-organization leads to lumps of similar species, where the spacing between the lumps corresponds to classical limiting similarity. The curves represent Gaussian distributions fitted through latent class analysis using the ‘gmdistribution’ function from the MATLAB statistics toolbox (MATLAB version R2011a) to find the best fit for models with 1–10 classes. See S1 File for model and S2 File for mode analysis.
Fig 2.
Size distributions of diving beetles in the different zoogeographical regions indicated in the central panel (e) and for the Northern (b) and Southern hemisphere (h) combined.
The solid curve represents a kernel smoothed estimator of species density (see methods). Dashed curves represent the fitted constituent distributions computed by means of latent class analysis as in Fig 1. See S2 File for mode analysis.
Fig 3.
Distributions of body length ratios in diving beetles.
(A) Body length ratios of pairs of species found in 1507 samples of Dutch ditches where >2 species of diving beetles were found (yielding a total of 28,762 locally co-occurring species pairs). To compute the ratios between pairs of species found in the same samples from Dutch ditches we used the average body lengths reported for those species. Subsequently we calculated the ratio of the length of all combinations of species within each sample. Dashed curves represent the fitted constituent distributions computed by means of latent class analysis as in Fig 1. (B). Frequency distribution of the peak-to-peak body length ratio for each zoogeographical region (n = 27) and of the northern and southern hemisphere aggregated (n = 11) (see Fig 2).
Fig 4.
Communities consisting of triplets of blind diving beetle species found in different underground aquifers (numbers) that became isolated 5 million years ago when Australian climate became arid.
Independently of the founder species, evolution led to a small a medium and a large species in each aquifer. H, B and C code the tribes Bidessini, Hydroporini and Copelatini; bars connect pairs of species that evolved from the same founder species (illustration courtesy of Chris Watts and Howard Hamond).