Paper detail

Evolution of unconditional dispersal in periodic environments

Organisms modulate their fitness in heterogeneous environments by dispersing. Prior work shows that there is selection against "unconditional" dispersal in spatially heterogeneous environments. "Unconditional" means individuals disperse at a rate independent of their location. We prove that if within-patch fitness varies spatially and between two values temporally, then there is selection for unconditional dispersal: any evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) or evolutionarily stable coalition (ESC) includes a dispersive phenotype. Moreover, at this ESS or ESC, there is at least one sink patch (i.e. geometric mean of fitness less than one) and no sources patches (i.e. geometric mean of fitness greater than one). These results coupled with simulations suggest that spatial-temporal heterogeneity due to abiotic forcing result in either an ESS with a dispersive phenotype or an ESC with sedentary and dispersive phenotypes. In contrast, spatial-temporal heterogeneity due to biotic interactions can select for higher dispersal rates that ultimately spatially synchronize population dynamics.