10.5061/DRYAD.370RV
Ratcliff, William C.
Georgia Institute of Technology
Hawthorne, Peter
University of Minnesota
Libby, Eric
Santa Fe Institute
Data from: Courting disaster: how diversification rate affects fitness
under risk
Dryad
dataset
2014
2014-11-13T17:03:21Z
2014-11-13T17:03:21Z
en
https://doi.org/10.1111/evo.12568
604115918 bytes
1
CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication
Life is full of risk. To deal with this uncertainty, many organisms have
evolved bet-hedging strategies that spread risk through phenotypic
diversification. These rates of diversification can vary by orders of
magnitude in different species. Here we examine how key characteristics of
risk and organismal ecology affect the fitness consequences of variation
in diversification rate. We find that rapid diversification is strongly
favored when the risk faced has a wide spatial extent, with a single
disaster affecting a large fraction of the population. This advantage is
especially great in small populations subject to frequent disaster. In
contrast, when risk is correlated through time, slow diversification is
favored because it allows adaptive tracking of disasters that tend to
occur in series. Naturally-evolved diversification mechanisms in diverse
organisms facing a broad array of environmental risks largely support
these results. The theory presented in this paper provides a testable
ecological hypothesis to explain the prevalence of slow stochastic
switching among microbes and rapid, within-clutch diversification
strategies among plants and animals.
Simulated data, Figure 1aSimulated data, Figure 1aSimulated data, Figure
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