  Population-level scaling in ecological systems arises from individual growth
and death with competitive constraints. We build on a minimal dynamical model
of metabolic growth where the tension between individual growth and mortality
determines population size distribution. We include resource competition based
on shared capture area separately. By varying relative rates of growth, death,
and competitive attrition, we connect regular and random spatial patterns
across sessile organisms from forests to ants, termites, and fairy circles.
Then, we consider transient temporal dynamics in the context of asymmetric
competition that primarily weakens the smaller of two competitors such as
canopy shading or large colony dominance. When such competition couples slow
timescales of growth with fast competitive death, it generates population shock
waves similar to those observed in forest demographic data. Our minimal
quantitative theory unifies spatiotemporal patterns across sessile organisms
through local competition mediated by the laws of metabolic growth which in
turn result from long-term evolutionary dynamics.
