Bet-hedging strategies in expanding populations
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PLOS
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2019-04-18Referencia bibliográfica
Villa Martín P, Muñoz MA, Pigolotti S (2019) Bet-hedging strategies in expanding populations. PLoS Comput Biol 15(4): e1006529.
Patrocinador
This study has been partially financed by the Consejería de Conocimiento, Investigación y Universidad, Junta de Andalucía and European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), ref. SOMM17/6105/UGR (to MAM).Resumen
In ecology, species can mitigate their extinction risks in uncertain environments by diversifying
individual phenotypes. This observation is quantified by the theory of bet-hedging, which
provides a reason for the degree of phenotypic diversity observed even in clonal populations.
Bet-hedging in well-mixed populations is rather well understood. However, many species
underwent range expansions during their evolutionary history, and the importance of phenotypic
diversity in such scenarios still needs to be understood. In this paper, we develop a theory
of bet-hedging for populations colonizing new, unknown environments that fluctuate
either in space or time. In this case, we find that bet-hedging is a more favorable strategy
than in well-mixed populations. For slow rates of variation, temporal and spatial fluctuations
lead to different outcomes. In spatially fluctuating environments, bet-hedging is favored compared
to temporally fluctuating environments. In the limit of frequent environmental variation,
no opportunity for bet-hedging exists, regardless of the nature of the environmental fluctuations.
For the same model, bet-hedging is never an advantageous strategy in the well-mixed
case, supporting the view that range expansions strongly promote diversification. These
conclusions are robust against stochasticity induced by finite population sizes. Our findings
shed light on the importance of phenotypic heterogeneity in range expansions, paving the
way to novel approaches to understand how biodiversity emerges and is maintained.