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Bet-hedging strategies in expanding populations

Martín Paula Villa, Miguel A. Muñoz, View ORCID ProfileSimone Pigolotti
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/429506
Martín Paula Villa
1Biological Complexity Unit, Okinawa Institute for Science and Technology and Graduate University, Onna, Okinawa 904–0495, Japan
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Miguel A. Muñoz
2Departamento de Electromagnetismo y Física de la Materia and Instituto Carlos I de Física Teórica y Computational, Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain
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Simone Pigolotti
1Biological Complexity Unit, Okinawa Institute for Science and Technology and Graduate University, Onna, Okinawa 904–0495, Japan
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  • ORCID record for Simone Pigolotti
  • For correspondence: simone.pigolotti@oist.jp
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Abstract

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. The theory of bet-hedging in well-mixed populations is rather well developed. 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.

Author summary Ecological populations are often exposed to unpredictable and variable environmental conditions. A number of strategies have evolved to cope with such uncertainty. One of them is stochastic phenotypic switching, by which some individuals in the community are enabled to tackle adverse conditions, even at the price of reducing overall growth in the short term. In this paper, we study the effectiveness of these “bet-hedging” strategies for a population in the process of colonizing new territory. We show that bet-hedging is more advantageous when the environment varies spatially rather than temporally, and infrequently rather than frequently.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.
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Posted September 27, 2018.
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Bet-hedging strategies in expanding populations
Martín Paula Villa, Miguel A. Muñoz, Simone Pigolotti
bioRxiv 429506; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/429506
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Bet-hedging strategies in expanding populations
Martín Paula Villa, Miguel A. Muñoz, Simone Pigolotti
bioRxiv 429506; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/429506

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