Evolving dispersal ability causes rapid adaptive radiation

Despite a long history of research since Darwin, the mechanism underlying rapid adaptive radiation remains poorly understood. All theories constructed to date require special assumptions, so none can comprehensively explain actual cases found in wide-ranging taxonomic groups. Here, we propose a simple theoretical solution to this problem. Namely, we extend the classical archipelago model of adaptive radiation into a more realistic model by adding one assumption, namely, the evolvability of dispersal ability, which is well supported empirically. Our individual-based simulations with evolvable dispersal ability showed that environmental heterogeneity among islands (or island-like habitats) led to an evolutionary decrease in dispersal ability. However, when islands are rather evenly distributed, as is often the case in actual archipelagos where adaptive radiation has been reported, the decline in dispersal ability that began in some island populations was quickly halted by the continuous influx of immigrants from other islands. The process of reduction in dispersal ability in these island populations was resumed almost synchronously when the dispersal ability began to decrease on the final island, which had maintained high dispersal ability and continued to release migrants for the longest duration. Then, a rapid loss of dispersal ability followed in all island populations. In short, the frequent simultaneous evolution of multiple allopatric incipient species was an inevitable consequence of the properties of ordinary archipelagos in our simulations. This study strongly suggests that the seemingly complex process of rapid radiation is driven by a simple mechanism of evolutionary reduction in dispersal ability.