Evolutionarily stable levels of aposematic defence in prey populations
Date
01/10/2023Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Our understanding of aposematism (the conspicuous signalling of a defence for the deterrence of predators) has advanced notably since its first observation in the late nineteenth century. Indeed, it extends the scope of a well-established game-theoretical model of this very same process both from the analytical standpoint (by considering regimes of varying background mortality and colony size) and from the practical standpoint (by assessing its efficacy and limitations in predicting the evolution of prey traits in finite simulated populations). The nature of the manuscript at hand is more mathematical and its aim is two-fold: first, to determine the relationship between evolutionarily stable levels of defence and signal strength under various regimes of background mortality and colony size. Second, to compare these predictions with simulations of finite prey populations that are subject to random local mutation. We compare the roles of absolute resident fitness, mutant fitness and stochasticity in the evolution of prey traits and discuss the importance of population size in the above.
Citation
Scaramangas , A , Broom , M , Ruxton , G D & Rouviere , A 2023 , ' Evolutionarily stable levels of aposematic defence in prey populations ' , Theoretical Population Biology , vol. 153 , pp. 15-36 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tpb.2023.03.001
Publication
Theoretical Population Biology
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0040-5809Type
Journal article
Description
Funding: This research would not have been possible without the generous EPSRC stipend; the authors are very grateful for the awarding of this studentship to Alan Scaramangas.Collections
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