Follow the weekly report of virtual evolving ecosystem’s very long run

[robin gras]

We study the evolutionary process and the emergence of species in a simulated ecosystem. We have conceived EcoSim, an individual-based evolving predator-prey ecosystem simulation. The agents evaluate their environment (e.g., distance to predator/prey, distance to potential breeding partner, distance to food, energy level), its internal state (e.g., fear, hunger, curiosity) and chooses among several possible actions such as evasion, eating or breeding. The behavioral model of each individual is unique and is the outcome of the evolution process. This is the only simulation modeling the fact that individual behaviors affect evolution and speciation. We were able to predict species extinction using information about spatial distribution of the individuals, to correlated genetic diversity with the fitness of a species, to show that the overall behaviour of our simulation is deterministic chaotic with multifractal properties and to predict speciation events using some features describing the species properties. This approach will be also used to study the species abundance distribution, patterns and rates of speciation, the evolution of sexual and asexual populations, the interaction and diffusion of an invasive species or a disease in an existing ecosystem, etc.

 

We propose a weekly presentation of a run of our simulation that will last for tenth of thousand of time steps at this site:

 

https://sites.google.com/site/ecosimgroup/research/ecosystem-simulation/long-run.

 

 

Every week we will add a page presenting a detailed summary of what happen in the system during the last 500 or 1000 time steps. We will show many graphs, videos and figures presenting the evolution of the system, including the number of individuals, the number of species, the amount of food available, the tree of life of the world, the distribution of age of the individuals, the evolved behavioral maps of some individuals, the variability of the gene alleles in the populations… This will allow following the ongoing evolutionary process and its effects on the whole world for thousand of generations.