This project is the third chapter of my doctoral thesis. In it, I investigated the  the potential for diversification of a consumer species that has two discrete life-stages, e.g. a juvenile and an adult stage, each of which feeds on two stage-specific resources. Is it possible that diversification occurs at the juvenile stage but not the adult? Or vice-versa? Can evolution, starting from one consumer species, lead to two, three, or even four species, each specialized for a different combination of resources?

(I intend to write here a popular science summary of the research methods and findings)

The analysis was done using the Wolfram language in the Mathematica notebook environment and the individual based simulations were written and performed in MATLAB.

This is the link to the article at bioRxiv

biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.08.31.506002v2journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/706813

The Github repository for this project is

github.com/pnvasc/complexLifeCycles
It is currently incomplete and I’m in the process of updating it.