Although science has grown faster than its resources for over 300 years, this situation is unstable. Eventually, the growth of science must slow to match that of its base, and researchers will have to compete harder. Verbal models of ecological competition provide scenarios of the likely conditions in the competitive science of the future. Individual researchers can expect to be more stressed and less productive. The scientific population will be more stable, reducing the youthfulness and immediacy of contemporary science, allowing the dominant individuals who succeed in fierce competition greater opportunity to impose theirviews. Science as a whole should expect more interdisciplinary infighting for available funds, and the largest subdisciplines will likely win even larger shares of the available pie. In a recent reallocation in Canada, aquatic sciences and related areas lost funds to supposedly more industrially and economically relevant fields, even though Canadian aquatic scientists outperform those competitors in terms of refereed publication and citation. Since the dominance of the USA is less marked in aquatic sciences, American aquatic scientists could find themselves competitively weak in funding reevaluations. A consequent reduction in American support would be a serious blow to the entire field. Researchers can compete by accepting the new conditions in science and using them to their advantage while applying their skills to the world's immediate problems. On the other hand, researchers can redimension their expectations to their resources.