Fitness consequences of threshold trait expression subject to environmental cues.

ABSTRACT: Most cases of alternative reproductive tactics (ARTs) are thought to represent conditional strategies, whereby high-status males express highly competitive phenotypes, whereas males below a certain status threshold resort to sneaky tactics. The underlying evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) model assumes that males of high competitive ability achieve higher fitness when expressing the territorial phenotype, whereas the less competitive males are more fit as sneakers, caused by fitness functions for the ARTs having different slopes and intersecting at a threshold value of competitive ability. The model, however, is notoriously difficult to test as it requires access to low-status territorials and high-status sneakers, that rarely occur in nature. Here, we test the conditional ESS in the an

SUBMITTER: Michalczyk L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6030524 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature