Robert Smith, Ph.D., assistant professor at the Farquhar College of Arts and Sciences, co-authored a research article on how dispersal affects the establishment and spread of invasive species, such as the python in South Florida. The article appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).
About the Research
From the authors: “Dispersal is necessary for spread into new habitats, but it has also been shown to inhibit spread. Theoretical studies suggest that the presence of a strong Allee effect may account for these counterintuitive observations. Experimental demonstration of this notion is lacking due to the difficulty in quantitative analysis of such phenomena in a natural setting.”
In this study, the authors “engineered Escherichia coli (E. coli) to exhibit a strong Allee effect and examined how the Allee effect would affect the spread of the engineered bacteria. Results provide direct experimental evidence that the Allee effect can explain the apparently paradoxical effects of dispersal on spread and have implications for guiding the spread of cooperative organisms.”
Smith’s research collaborators include Cheemeng Tan from Carnegie Mellon University; Jaydeep K. Srimani, Anand Pai, Katherine A. Riccione, and Lingchong You, from Duke University; and Hao Song from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
Read More
—View Smith’s research article on the spread and survival of species (PNAS)