The fate of cooperation during range expansions.

ABSTRACT: Species expand their geographical ranges following an environmental change, long range dispersal, or a new adaptation. Range expansions not only bring an ecological change, but also affect the evolution of the expanding species. Although the dynamics of deleterious, neutral, and beneficial mutations have been extensively studied in expanding populations, the fate of alleles under frequency-dependent selection remains largely unexplored. The dynamics of cooperative alleles are particularly interesting because selection can be both frequency and density dependent, resulting in a coupling between population and evolutionary dynamics. This coupling leads to an increase in the frequency of cooperators at the expansion front, and, under certain conditions, the entire front can be taken over by c

SUBMITTER: Korolev KS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3610630 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature