COMPETITIVE COEXISTENCE IN BIOLOGICAL-SYS TEMS - ANALOGY WITH A DRIVEN AND DAMPED OSCILLATOR

In a series of previous works it was shown that the ''competitive excl usion principle'' ceases to be valid when the non-dominant species has the ability to follow a wavelike perturbation in the population of th eir common food source. In this work we study the possibility of coexi stence in the presence of an external, spatially periodic influence, f or a homogeneous distribution in the food population. We show that the equation that describes the population of the diffusive species is th at of a driven and damped oscillator. Finally, the linear stability of this system is studied.