Coexistence and Replacement of Two Different Maturation Strategies Adopted by a Stage-Structured Population

Abstract

Maturation strategies play a key role in the survival and development of populations. In response to changes in the external environment and human interventions, populations adopt appropriate maturation strategies. Different maturation strategies can lead to different birth and mortality rates. In this paper, we develop and analyze a stage-structured population model with two maturation strategies to obtain conditions for the coexistence of two maturation strategies and conditions for competitive exclusion. Our results also show that equality of fitness—represented by basic reproductive numbers being greater than 1 under different maturation strategies—promotes the coexistence of the two strategies. The reason why a strategy is replaced by another one is that the population adopting this strategy has weak fitness, which is measured by the basic reproductive number.