Data from: Examining community stability in the face of mass extinction in communities of digital organisms

Digital evolution is a computer-based instantiation of Darwinian evolution
in which short self-replicating computer programs compete, mutate, and
evolve. It is an excellent platform for addressing topics in long-term
evolution and paleobiology, such as mass extinction and recovery, with
experimental evolutionary approaches. We evolved model communities with
ecological interdependence among community members, which were subjected
to two principal types of mass extinction: a pulse extinction that killed
randomly, and a selective press extinction involving an alteration of the
abiotic environment to which the communities had to adapt. These
treatments were applied at two different strengths, along with unperturbed
control experiments. We examined how stability in the digital communities
was affected from the perspectives of division of labor, relative shift in
rank abundance, and genealogical connectedness of the community's
component ecotypes. Mass extinction that was due to a Strong Press
treatment was most effective in producing reshaped communities that
differed from the pre-treatment ones in all of the measured perspectives;
weaker versions of the treatments did not generally produce significant
departures from a Control treatment; and results for the Strong Pulse
treatment generally fell between those extremes. The Strong Pulse
treatment differed from others in that it produced a slight but detectable
shift towards more generalized communities. Compared to Press treatments,
Pulse treatments also showed a greater contribution from re-evolved
ecological doppelgangers rather than new ecotypes. However, relatively few
Control communities showed stability in any of these metrics over the
whole course of the experiment, and most did not represent stable states
(by some measure of stability) that were disrupted by the extinction
treatments. Our results have interesting, broad qualitative parallels with
findings from the paleontological record, and show the potential of
digital evolution studies to illuminate many aspects of mass extinction
and recovery by addressing them in a truly experimental manner.