Abstract
One potential evolutionary response to environmental heterogeneity is the production of randomly variable offspring through developmental instability, a type of bet-hedging. I used an individual-based, genetically explicit model to examine the evolution of developmental instability. The model considered both temporal and spatial heterogeneity alone and in combination, the effect of migration pattern (stepping stone vs. island), and life-history strategy. I confirmed that temporal heterogeneity alone requires a threshold amount of variation to select for a substantial amount of developmental instability. For spatial heterogeneity only, the response to selection on developmental instability depended on the life-history strategy and the form and pattern of dispersal with the greatest response for island migration when selection occurred before dispersal. Both spatial and temporal variation alone select for similar amounts of instability, but in combination resulted in substantially more instability than either alone. Local adaptation traded off against bet-hedging, but not in a simple linear fashion. I found higher-order interactions between life-history patterns, dispersal rates, dispersal patterns, and environmental heterogeneity that are not explainable by simple intuition. We need additional modeling efforts to understand these interactions and empirical tests that explicitly account for all of these factors.
Highlights
Central to the theory of evolution is understanding the process of adaptation through trait evolution, including adaptation to varying environments
When the only environmental heterogeneity was temporal and the amount of variation was less than the width (r) of the selection function, there was little increase in the amount of developmental instability as environmental heterogeneity increased (Fig. 2)
Temporal variation selected for increased developmental instability resulting in bet-hedging through a trade-off between mean fitness and phenotypic variance
Summary
Central to the theory of evolution is understanding the process of adaptation through trait evolution, including adaptation to varying environments. Another potential solution was being proposed: the production of phenotypically variable offspring through some sort of random process, rather than through a process of direct environmental responsiveness (Slatkin 1974; Philippi and Seger 1989; Simons and Johnston 1997; Starrfelt and Kokko 2012). This process has been given a variety of names such as adaptive coin flipping, developmental noise, and diversified bet-hedging. The jack-of-all-trades strategy is sometimes referred to as conservative bet-hedging (Starrfelt and Kokko 2012), a usage that I will avoid
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