The constant philopater hypothesis : a new life history invariant for dispersal evolution
Abstract
Surprising invariance relationships have emerged from the study of social interaction, whereby a cancelling-out of multiple partial effects of genetic, ecological or demographic parameters means that they have no net impact upon the evolution of a social behaviour. Such invariants play a pivotal role in the study of social adaptation: on the one hand, they provide theoretical hypotheses that can be empirically tested; and, on the other hand, they provide benchmark frameworks against which new theoretical developments can be understood. Here we derive a novel invariant for dispersal evolution: the “constant philopater hypothesis” (CPH). Specifically, we find that, irrespective of variation in maternal fecundity, all mothers are favoured to produce exactly the same number of philopatric offspring, with high-fecundity mothers investing proportionally more, and low-fecundity mothers investing proportionally less, into dispersing offspring. This result holds for female and male dispersal, under haploid, diploid and haplodiploid modes of inheritance, irrespective of the sex ratio, local resource availability, and whether mother or offspring controls the latter’s dispersal propensity. We explore the implications of this result for evolutionary conflicts of interest – and the exchange and withholding of contextual information – both within and between families, and we show that the CPH is the fundamental invariant that underpins and explains a wider family of invariance relationships that emerge from the study of social evolution.
Citation
Rodrigues , A & Gardner , A 2016 , ' The constant philopater hypothesis : a new life history invariant for dispersal evolution ' , Journal of Evolutionary Biology , vol. 29 , no. 1 , pp. 153–166 . https://doi.org/10.1111/jeb.12771
Publication
Journal of Evolutionary Biology
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1010-061XType
Journal article
Rights
© 2015 The Authors. Journal of Evolutionary Biology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Society for Evolutionary Biology. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Description
This research was supported by Wolfson College Cambridge (A.M.M.R.) and the Natural Environment Research Council (grant no. NE/K009524/1) (A.G.).Collections
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