The Beddington–DeAngelis Competitive Response: Intra-Species Interference Enhances Coexistence in Species Competition

Species coexistence is a major issue in ecology. We disentangled the role of individual interference when competing in the classical interference competition model. For the first time, we considered simultaneously intra- and inter-species interference by introducing the Beddington–DeAngelis competitive response into the classical competition model. We found a trade-off between intra- and inter-species interference that refines in a sense the well-known balance of intra- and inter-species competition coefficients. As a result, we found that (i) global coexistence is possible for a larger range of values of the inter-/intra-species competition coefficients and contributes to explaining the high prevalence of species coexistence in nature. This feature is exclusively due to intra-species interference. (ii) We found multi-stability scenarios previously described in the literature that can be reinterpreted in terms of individuals interference.