The ecological order of persisting species during habitat destruction

Habitat destruction has long been thought to lead the biased extinctions of some species. An interesting and important question is: who will be the first to become extinct in communities during habitat destruction, the inferior competitors or the superior competitors? Firstly, we demonstrate, by means of numerical simulation, an “odds–even” evolution rule: after extinction of a few dominant species following large habitat destruction, the rest of the community shows a spontaneous hierarchical self-organization, i.e., the species with either odd or even numbers become more abundant. Secondly, we show that for moderate or small habitat destruction, it is the poor competitor(s) that goes extinct first. Lastly, some ecological orders of persisting species of different metapopulation (community) during habitat destruction are ranged in the paper. These ecological orders of persisting species show that there exists a special ecological position in different metapopulation system (community) in which the species will evolve into the strongest (best) competitor during habitat destruction.