Short-term insurance versus long-term bet-hedging strategies as adaptations to variable environments.

ABSTRACT: Understanding how organisms adapt to environmental variation is a key challenge of biology. Central to this are bet-hedging strategies that maximize geometric mean fitness across generations, either by being conservative or diversifying phenotypes. Theoretical models have identified environmental variation across generations with multiplicative fitness effects as driving the evolution of bet-hedging. However, behavioral ecology has revealed adaptive responses to additive fitness effects of environmental variation within lifetimes, either through insurance or risk-sensitive strategies. Here, we explore whether the effects of adaptive insurance interact with the evolution of bet-hedging by varying the position and skew of both arithmetic and geometric mean fitness functions. We find that ins

SUBMITTER: Haaland TR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6590291 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature