The timing of life history events in presence of soft disturbances

TL;DR

This paper models how biological populations choose the timing of life events like migration and breeding considering competition and random disturbances, analyzing evolutionarily stable strategies and effects of climate change.

Contribution

It extends previous models by removing the zero-probability disturbance constraint, revealing complex strategies including mass early arrivals influenced by competition levels.

Findings

Massive early arrivals occur when competition exceeds a threshold.

Disturbances can temporarily reduce population fitness.

Climate change impacts can alter optimal strategies and fitness outcomes.

Abstract

We study a model for the evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) used by biological populations for choosing the time of life-history events, such as migration and breeding. In our model we accounted for both intra-species competition (early individuals have a competitive advantage) and a disturbance which strikes at a random time, killing a fraction $1-p$ of the population. Disturbances include spells of bad weather, such as freezing or heavily raining days. It has been shown in Iwasa and Levin (1995), that when $p=0$, then the ESS is a mixed strategy, where individuals wait for a certain time and afterwards start arriving (or breeding) every day. We remove the constraint $p=0$ and show that if $0<p<1$ then the ESS still implies a mixed choice of times, but strong competition may lead to a massive arrival at the earliest time possible of a fraction of the population, while the rest will arrive throughout the whole period during which the disturbance may occur. More precisely, given $p$, there is a threshold for the competition parameter $a$, above which massive arrivals occur and below which there is a behaviour as in Iwasa and Levin (1995). We study the behaviour of the ESS and of the average fitness of the population, depending on the parameters involved. We also discuss how the population may be affected by climate change, in two respects: first, how the ESS should change under the new climate and whether this change implies an increase of the average fitness; second, which is the impact of the new climate on a population that still follows the old strategy. We show that, at least under some conditions, extreme weather events imply a temporary decrease of the average fitness (thus an increasing mortality). If the population adapts to the new climate, the survivors may have a larger fitness.