Gause was supervised by Evgenii Smirnov. Interested in the application of statistics in biosystematics, Smirnov promoted these methods to Gause. In that period Gause was investigating the distribution of Orthoptera in the North Caucasus, quantitatively estimating ecoplastisity of species. Gause earned his BSc at Moscow State University in 1931, and was employed in Alpatov's laboratory at the Zoological Institute of Moscow University. He earned his DBiolSc in 1936 for the series of works published in 1930-1934 and compiled as a dissertation titled Studies on the dynamics of mixed populations. One of the opponents was Vladimir Vernadsky. The struggle for existence by competitive exclusion In 1932, Gause published what has become known as the competitive exclusion principle, based on experimental work done with mixed cultures of both yeast and Paramecium species. Aphoristically, it was formulated as "One niche — one species". The principle asserts that no two species with similar ecological niches can coexist in a stable equilibrium, meaning that when two species compete for exactly the same requirements, one will be slightly more efficient than the other and will reproduce at a higher rate as a result. The fate of the less efficient species is local extinction. In another series of experiments with the infusorians Paramecium as prey and Didinium as a predator, imitating periodical migrations, he obtained nearly ideally sinusoidal fluctuations of the abundances in this model, previously modeled only theoretically. It appeared in English as an abridged version in USA, and finally published in Russian only in 1984. One of the first acceptances of the advantages of polycultures was also obtained by Gause on Paramecium. He studied ecologically similar species of infusorians. Keeping them as monocultures he obtained higher abundances of individual species than in polyculture. Meanwhile, significantly higher was the overall abundance of the polyculture. In 1940 Gause prepares a monograph Ecology and some problems of the origin of species. The original manuscript in Russian was not published due to start of the World War II in the Soviet Union. It appeared in as an abridged version in USA, and finally published in Russian only in 1984. Protoplasm asymmetry In the 1930s Gause conducted a series of studies, dedicated to the protoplasm asymmetry. These works raised interest among biogeochemists, including V.V. Vernadsky. The search for new antibiotics From 1939 Gause began studies of antibiotics. Seemed like a sudden change in research topic, but this was a development