Species packing in nonsmooth competition models

Despite the potential for competition to generate equilibrium coexistence of infinitely tightly packed species along a trait axis, prior work has shown that the classical expectation of system-specific limits to the similarity of stably coexisting species is sound. A key reason is that known instances of continuous coexistence are fragile, requiring fine-tuning of parameters: A small alteration of the parameters leads back to the classical limitingsimilarity predictions. Here we present, but then cast aside, a new theoretical challenge to the expectation of limiting similarity. Robust continuous coexistence can arise if competition between species is modeled as a nonsmooth function of their differences—specifically, if the competition kernel (differential response of species’ growth rates to changes in the density of other species along the trait axis) has a nondifferentiable sharp peak at zero trait difference. We will say that these kernels possess a “kink.” The difference in predicted behavior stems from the fact that smooth kernels do not change to a first-order approximation around their maxima, creating strong competitive interactions between similar species. “Kinked” kernels, on the other hand, decrease linearly even for small species differences, reducing interspecific competitioncompared with intraspecific competitionfor arbitrarily small species differences. We investigate what mechanisms would lead to kinked kernels in the first place. It turns out that discontinuities in resource utilization generate them. We argue that such sudden jumps in the utilization of resources are unrealistic, and therefore, one should expect kernels to be smooth in reality.