Verification and reformulation of the competitive exclusion principle

• We show a mechanism of soliton-like behaviour of colliding population waves.
• We propose and investigate cellular automata models of interspecific competition.
• Moderate propagation of competitors may promote their indefinite coexistence.
• We provide a fully mechanistic reformulation of the competitive exclusion principle.

Biodiversity conservation is becoming increasingly urgent. It is important to find mechanisms of competitive coexistence of species with different fitness in especially difficult circumstances – on one limiting resource, in isolated stable uniform habitat, without any trade-offs and cooperative interactions. Here we show a such mechanism of competitive coexistence based on a soliton-like behaviour of population waves. We have modelled it by the logical axiomatic deterministic individual-based cellular automata method. Our mechanistic models of population and ecosystem dynamics are of white-box type and so they provide direct insight into mechanisms under study. The mechanism provides indefinite coexistence of two, three and four competing species. This mechanism violates the known formulations of the competitive exclusion principle. As a consequence, we propose a fully mechanistic and most stringent formulation of the principle.

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