Competitive exclusion in a discrete time, size structured chemostat model英文文献.pdfVIP

Competitive Exclusion in a Discrete-time, Size-structured Chemostat Model Hal L. Smith Department of Mathematics Arizona State University Tempe, AZ 85287–1804, USA E-mail: halsmith@asu.edu Xiao-Qiang Zhao Department of Mathematics and Statistics Memorial University of Newfoundland St. John’s, NF A1C 5S7, Canada E-mail: xzhao@math.mun.ca May 22, 2000 Abstract Competitive exclusion is proved for a discrete-time, size-structured, nonlinear matrix model of -species competition in the chemostat. The winner is the population able to grow at the lowest nutrient concentration. This extends the results of earlier work of the first author [11] where the case = 2 was treated. Key words and phrases: Chemostat, discrete-time, size-structured model, competi- tive exclusion. AMS subject classifications: 34C35, 92A15 1 Introduction The classical chemostat model of microbial growth and competition for a limiting sub- strate has played a central role in population biology. See [12] for a treatment of chemo- stat models. However, the classical model ignores the size structure of the population Supported by NSF Grant DMS 9700910. Supported in part by the NSERC of Canada. 1 and the observation that many microbes roughly double in size before dividing. Size- structured chemostat models formulated by Metz and Diekmann [10] and by Cushing [3, 4] (see also [12]) lead to hyperbolic partial differential equations with nonlocal bound- ary conditions. A conceptually simpler approach to modeling size structure was taken by Gage, Williams and Horton in [5