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A model for character displacement based on competition between species

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2016

M. G. Bulmer*
Affiliation:
Department of Biomathematics, University of Oxford

Extract

When two closely-related species have a partially-overlapping geographical range, it sometimes happens that populations of the two species are very similar in the non-overlapping parts of the range where only one species is present, but that they diverge and are easily distinguishable in the area of overlap where both species occur together. This phenomenon is known as character displacement. One of the best known examples occurs in two species of Rock Nuthatches (Sitta neumayer and S. tephronota) in their area of overlap in Iran (Vaurie (1951)). A plausible explanation of this phenomenon is that it is due to competition between the two species. The purpose of this paper is to construct a model for character displacement based on this idea. A full account of this work will be published elsewhere (Bulmer (1973)).

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Applied Probability Trust 1974 

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References

Bulmer, M. G. (1973) Density-dependent selection and character displacement. Amer. Natur. To appear.Google Scholar
Vaurie, C. (1951) Adaptive differences between two sympatric species of nuthatches (Sitta) . Pages 163166 in Proc. 10th Int. Ornith. Congr. (ed. Hörstadius, S.). Almqvist and Wiksell, Uppsala.Google Scholar