Extraordinary Sex Ratios: Cultural Effects on Ecological Consequences
F. Molnar Jr, T. Caraco, G. Korniss

TL;DR
This paper models how sex ratios and cultural traits influence population dynamics, revealing conditions for coexistence, invasion success, and extinction, with implications for ecological and evolutionary outcomes.
Contribution
It introduces a novel model combining sex-ratio alleles and culturally transmitted traits affecting mortality, highlighting their ecological interactions and spatial effects.
Findings
A strong Allee effect depends on sex ratio and cultural traits.
Greater female allocation always invades and excludes lesser allocations.
Cultural traits can enable population persistence or lead to extinction.
Abstract
We model sex-structured population dynamics to analyze pairwise competition between groups differing both genetically and culturally. A sex-ratio allele is expressed in the heterogametic sex only, so that assumptions of Fisher's analysis do not apply. Sex-ratio evolution drives cultural evolution of a group-associated trait governing mortality in the homogametic sex. The two-sex dynamics under resource limitation induces a strong Allee effect that depends on both sex ratio and cultural trait values. We describe the resulting threshold, separating extinction from positive growth, as a function of female and male densities. When initial conditions avoid extinction due to the Allee effect, different sex ratios cannot coexist; in our model, greater female allocation always invades and excludes a lesser allocation. But the culturally transmitted trait interacts with the sex ratio to…
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