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Dispersal: risk spreading versus local adaptation
1Department of Mathematics, University of Turku, FIN-20014 Turku, Finland.
The American Naturalist
|August 19, 2008
Summary
Organisms balance spreading risk in changing environments with adapting to local habitats. This study reveals multiple evolutionary strategies for dispersal and specialization, with one stable outcome.
Area of Science:
- Evolutionary Biology
- Ecology
- Theoretical Biology
Background:
- Organisms face a trade-off between dispersing to reduce risk and specializing to exploit local resources.
- Understanding the interplay between dispersal and habitat specialization is crucial for predicting evolutionary trajectories.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the simultaneous evolution of dispersal and habitat specialization in stochastic environments.
- To identify evolutionarily stable strategies (ESS) for dispersal and specialization in a two-patch model.
Main Methods:
- Development of a simple two-patch model.
- Analysis of evolutionary game theory to determine evolutionarily stable attractors.
- Simulation of evolutionary dynamics to observe adaptive diversification.
Main Results:
- Identified multiple locally evolutionarily stable attractors, including specialists, generalists, and dispersal polymorphisms.
- Demonstrated that typically only one global evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) exists.
- Observed evolutionary branching, leading to adaptive diversification.
Conclusions:
- The interplay between risk spreading and local adaptation shapes the evolution of dispersal and specialization.
- Evolutionary dynamics can lead to diverse stable states and adaptive diversification through branching.
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