Contest competition

In ecology, contest competition refers to a situation where available resources, such as food and mates, are utilized only by one or a few individuals, thus preventing development or reproduction of other individuals. It refers to a hypothetical situation in which several individuals stage a contest for which one eventually emerges victorious. Contest competition has been demonstrated in controlled laboratory experiments among parasitic wasps.[1] Contest competition is the opposite of scramble competition, a situation in which available resources are shared equally among individuals.

As contest competition allows the monopolization of resources, offspring will typically always be produced and survive until adulthood independent of the population size. This results in stable population dynamics, in stark contrast to scramble competition which can result in periodic or chaotic population dynamics. The Beverton-Holt model is often used to represent population dynamics arising from contest competition. This model, and a few other well-known population models, can be explicitly derived from individual-level processes assuming contest competition and a random distribution of individuals among resources.[2]

References
  1. Wai, K. M., & Fujii, K. (1990). “Intraspecific larval competition among wasps parasitic of bean weevil larvae”. http://meme.biology.tohoku.ac.jp/popecol/RP%20PDF/32(1)/pp.85.pdf. Researches on population ecology, 32: 85-98.
  2. Brännström, A., and Sumpter DJT (2005). “The role of competition and clustering in population dynamics”. http://www.math.uu.se/~david/web/BrannstromSumpter05a.pdf. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 275:2065-2072.

Further reading
  • Dammhahn, Melanie, and Peter M. Kappeler. "Scramble or contest competition over food in solitarily foraging mouse lemurs (Microcebus spp.): new insights from stable isotopes." American Journal of Physical Anthropology 141.2 (2010): 181-189.
  • Tuda, Midori, and Yoh Iwasa. "Evolution of contest competition and its effect on host–parasitoid dynamics." Evolutionary Ecology 12.7 (1998): 855-870.
  • Henson, Shandelle M., and J. M. Cushing. "Hierarchical models of intra-specific competition: scramble versus contest." Journal of Mathematical Biology 34.7 (1996): 755-772.
  • Kemp, Darrell J., and John Alcock. "Lifetime resource utilization, flight physiology, and the evolution of contest competition in territorial insects." The American Naturalist 162.3 (2003): 290-301.
  • Kemp, Darrell J., and Christer Wiklund. "Fighting without weaponry: a review of male-male contest competition in butterflies." Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 49.6 (2001): 429-442.
  • Thomas, J. A., G. W. Elmes, and J. C. Wardlaw. "Contest competition among Maculinea rebeli butterfly larvae in ant nests." Ecological Entomology 18.1 (1993): 73-76.
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