Effect of compositional fluctuation on the survival of bet-hedging species

Abstract

Understanding the coexistence of diverse species in a changing environment is an important problem in community ecology. Bet-hedging is a strategy that helps species survive in such changing environments. However, studies of bet-hedging have often focused on the expected long-term growth rate of the species by itself, neglecting competition with other coexisting species. Here we study the extinction risk of a bet-hedging species in competition with others. We show that there are three contributions to the extinction risk. The first is the usual demographic fluctuation due to stochastic reproduction and selection processes in finite populations. The second, due to the fluctuation of population growth rate caused by environmental changes, may actually reduce the extinction risk for small populations. Besides those two, we reveal a third contribution, which is unique to bet-hedging species that diversify into multiple phenotypes: The phenotype composition of the population will fluctuate over time, resulting in increased extinction risk. We compare such compositional fluctuation to the demographic and environmental contributions, showing how they have different effects on the extinction risk depending on the population size, generation overlap, and environmental correlation.