Abstract
Dispersal is a topic of great interest in ecology. Many organisms adopt one of two distinct dispersal tactics at reproduction: the production of small offspring that can disperse over long distances (such as seeds and spawned eggs), or budding. The latter is observed in some colonial organisms, such as clonal plants, corals and ants, in which (super)organisms split their body into components of relatively large size that disperse to a short distance. Contrary to the common dispersal viewpoint, short-dispersal colonial organisms often flourish even in environments with frequent disturbances. In this paper, we investigate the conditions that favor budding over long-distance dispersal of small offspring, focusing on the life history of the colony growth and the colony division ratio. These conditions are the relatively high mortality of very small colonies, logistic growth, the ability of dispersers to peacefully seek and settle unoccupied spaces, and small spatial scale of environmental disturbance. If these conditions hold, budding is advantageous even when environmental disturbance is frequent. These results suggest that the demography or life history of the colony underlies the behaviors of the colonial organisms.
Highlights
We aim to clarify the effect of colonial life history patterns on the population dynamics
We examined the ecological conditions under which budding can be advantageous over migration in colonial organisms
The main conclusions are summarized as follows: (1) when the life history parameters are independent of colony size, budding colonies are overwhelmed by dispersive colonies
Summary
Dispersal determines the genetic structure of the meta-population and influences the evolution of individual characteristics such as mortality, reproductive efforts, sex allocation and altruism [1,2,3]. In the pioneering meta-population model of Hamilton and May (1977) it was shown that dispersal can evolve even when the dispersal cost is so high that most dispersers are destined to die. Subsequent studies identified specific factors that favor dispersal over nondispersal, such as the avoidance of competition among relatives and inbreeding [1,2]. Disturbances such as predation, drought and flooding are regarded as important general triggers of dispersal, encouraging organisms to hedge the risks [6]
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