Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Ecology — how organisms interact with each other and their environment — symbiosis and host–microbe partnerships, competition, herbivory and trophic interactions, community structure, resilience and regime shifts in ecosystems (ADR-028). How a partner comes to live inside another and depend on it is endosymbiosis (ADR-055).
8 of 191 CASE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| CASE-024 | A coral reef | The owner’s second holobiont direction (U30): a reef as a coordinated ecological whole. Its job changed four times in the exchange; filed once so that each change is visible. | Active |
| CASE-047 | Gut microbes and the host’s hunger and mood: a lower-level collective that can drive the person | The owner’s example (2026-10-11). The human gut microbiome is a community of other organisms inside the person. Through metabolites, mimics of host appetite peptides, the immune system and the vagus, it can change hunger and affect: robustly in rodents, modestly and inconsistently in humans so far. Documented, with the evidence graded in LIT-903 and LIT-915. Used as the case of drive from a lower level that is itself a collective. | Active |
| CASE-117 v3 | Emergent specialization and recovery in a population of adaptive operators: identically parameterized operators whose contributions, influence and training opportunities co-evolve over a changing task distribution, compared across fixed and learned features, uniform, endorsement-based and contribution-based influence, coupled and decoupled training exposure, and imposed and endogenous diversity | The study proposed in the synthesis the owner relayed on 2026-10-18 for QUESTION-083 and the questions filed with it. Operators differ only by initialization and experience. It measures whether stable niches emerge, whether specialists recover after long irrelevance, and whether the organization adapts after losing a dominant specialist. The decisive comparison holds the final diversity of operator usage roughly fixed while changing the mechanism that produced it. Ordinary mixture-of-experts routing is the baseline. Even positive results would not show self-constitution (CLAIM-288). | Active |
| CASE-118 v2 | Two competing components with interaction matrix A = [[1, ρ], [ρ, 1]]: with equal growth rates their invasion growth is 1 − ρ, the smallest eigenvalue of the Gram matrix, and with growth rates 1 ± δ the same matrix supports coexistence only when |δ| < (1 − ρ)/(1 + ρ), so feature geometry alone does not fix coexistence | From the synthesis the owner relayed on 2026-10-18, checked. The two-component Lotka–Volterra system with symmetric overlap ρ: invasion growth 1 − ρ equals λ_min(A), and κ(A) = (1 + ρ)/(1 − ρ), so overlap weakens recovery and ill-conditions the features together. Holding A fixed and setting r = (1 + δ, 1 − δ) gives the coexistence equilibrium n* = (1/(1 + ρ) ± δ/(1 − ρ)), feasible only when |δ| < (1 − ρ)/(1 + ρ). The same representation geometry supports coexistence under one supply and exclusion under another. | Active |
| CASE-119 | Three demands each requiring one coordinate of an outcome to equal 1, with attainable outcomes (1,1,0), (1,0,1) and (0,1,1): every pair is jointly satisfiable and the triple is not, and a new composite policy that can also produce (1,1,1) relieves the frustration by enlarging the attainable set, with the acceptance sets unchanged and no demand suppressed | From the synthesis the owner relayed on 2026-10-18. A compatibility complex with all three edges and no filled triangle, the minimal structurally frustrated collection of CLAIM-347 with three members. When the organization acquires a composite operation that can produce (1,1,1), ℛ(𝒪) ⊊ ℛ(𝒪′) and the complex gains the triangle: relief in CLAIM-347’s sense, by changing what is attainable, not by weakening a demand. The construction says such relief is possible; whether specialization produces it is QUESTION-133. | Active |
| CASE-171 v3 | Mealybugs, Tremblaya and Moranella: a bacterium inside a bacterium inside an insect, amino-acid pathways patched together from three genomes and genes transferred from other bacteria, and an inner symbiont replaced several times while the transferred genes stayed | In the mealybug Planococcus citri, Moranella lives inside Tremblaya. Essential amino-acid pathways need gene products from both bacteria and the insect (LIT-1565). At least 22 genes the insect acquired from other bacteria, none from Tremblaya, fill symbiont gaps (LIT-1569), and the inner symbiont has been replaced several times across mealybugs while those genes persisted (LIT-1572). Used as the case where function is distributed across nested boundaries and constituent lineages turn over. | Proposed |
| CASE-173 v3 | Aphids and Buchnera: an obligate nutritional symbiosis in which neither partner reproduces alone, and the symbiont’s genome reduced to a seventh of E. coli’s | Buchnera lives in aphid bacteriocytes and is passed from mother to egg. Its 641-kb genome keeps the pathways for the amino acids its host needs and has lost most else (LIT-1596); its genes evolve fast and A+T-biased under Muller’s ratchet (LIT-1573). The record’s reading of Wilson and Barker reports Godfrey-Smith placing the pair as both an organism and a Darwinian individual (NOTE-114). Used as the case of high mutual dependence and high reproductive cohesion reached through reduction, with no gene transfer to the host reported in the works it rests on. | Proposed |
| CASE-177 v2 | Hodgkinia in cicadas: one endosymbiont splitting into two to dozens of interdependent lineages, with near-complementary gene sets, idiosyncratic fragmentation in Magicicada, and hosts transmitting up to six times as many cells to keep every lineage | In some Tettigades cicadas, the endosymbiont Hodgkinia split into two cell lineages with almost perfectly complementary gene sets, the functionality of one (LIT-1563), and it has done so at least six times in the genus (LIT-1586). In Magicicada it fragmented into twenty or more genomic circles per species (LIT-1612, LIT-1602). Hosts compensate by transmitting more cells to each egg (LIT-1590). Used as the case where dependence and the number of parts grow with no new collective function, and the host pays. | Proposed |