Well, the idea is to show that under certain conditions you can have non-exclusive co-existence of two species without spatial or any other separation. The competitive exclusion principle is one of the major rules in population genetics and ecology. There are well-known exceptions for that (like plankton), but they are still explained by some kind of separation between species.
Actually, I am thinking that the system that I'm proposing does not have to rely on the fact that species rarely interact. That was a wrong approach. The actual idea is this:
The average fitness of a species is set by two opposing forces. Natural selection leads to continuous increase in fitness. Mutation and stochastic events lead to decrease in fitness. At some fitness value these two forces equalize and the average fitness does not change anymore. So if there are two competing species and one of them gains some advantageous mutation then stochastic events will push its fitness down, back to the optimal level. This creates a situation where both species have fixed fitness and one cannot out-compete the other.
I would like to test this idea. For most species that have large population sizes and low mutation rates, the optimal fitness value is pretty high, because stochastic effects are minor. Any experiment with such species would require a lot of time. But for viruses (and I'm interested in viruses) the mutation rates are very high. Add to that the conditions under which the stochastic effects are important and the average fitness will be at some average level. So it will have a potential for a going up or down a lot and will be fairly dynamic. This would allow to do experiments over fairly short time periods.
Here is an example of experiments with viral fitness in tissue culture:
http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticl...al.pone.0000271The time scale is several months, which is quite doable. And viral fitness changed 1.5-fold, showing that it is indeed very dynamic. So I would start with two viruses that have exactly the same fitness and then let them go the way they did in this paper (large population sizes, deterministic increase in fitness) or in a system with a large number of stochastic events (that can be accomplished by transferring low number of virions from one culture to another). I would expect to see that in the first case one virus outcompetes the other pretty quickly, but in the second case the viruses would co-exist for some time.