Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-25-2025
Abstract
The hypothesis of competitive diversification asserts that increased intraspecific competition will cause a population to generalize in resource use. The reasoning is that as preferred resources are depleted, individuals which use alternative resources become more fit, leading to an overall broadening of resource use. However, recent studies have shown instances of the opposite effect: increased intraspecific competition leading to increased population resource specialization. We explored how intraspecific competition could affect population resource specialization by creating an evolutionary game theoretic consumer-resource model in which individuals have both resource use preference and resource use breadth which are flexible and adaptable. Using this model, we see how the consumer’s population specialization changes in response to increases in population size and therefore intensity of intraspecific competition. We show that greater population specialization can result from intraspecific competition particularly at low population densities. We hypothesize that this may be because specialization offers a competitive advantage as more specialized individuals can acquire more of the preferred resources without greatly sacrificing alternative resources. This competitive advantage becomes magnified under certain ecological and evolutionary conditions, such as a low diversity of resources and a high benefit of specialization.
Keywords
competition, diversification, ecological specialization, niche
Language
English
Publication Title
Dynamic Games and Applications
Rights
© 2025 The Author(s). This is an Open Access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Halloway, A.H., Brown, J.S. Intraspecific Competition Can Promote Population-Level Specialization. Dyn Games Appl 15, 1445–1466 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13235-025-00661-3
Manuscript Version
Final Publisher Version