Perennial life-histories and demographic advantages may play contradictory roles in the evolution of plant mating systems

TL;DR

This paper develops a continuous-time model to explore how perennial life-histories influence plant mating systems, revealing that such life-histories can lead to high inbreeding depression and demographic advantages for self-fertilisation.

Contribution

It introduces a new deterministic continuous-time model accounting for overlapping generations and feedback effects, challenging previous models' predictions about inbreeding depression.

Findings

Perennial life-histories can cause high inbreeding depression despite inbreeding.

Higher heterozygosity at adult stages in perennials influences genetic dynamics.

Self-fertilisation may have demographic benefits independent of reproductive success.

Abstract

When predicting the fate and consequences of recurring deleterious mutations in self-fertilising populations most models developed make the assumption that populations have discrete non-overlapping generations. This makes them biologically irrelevant when considering perennial species with over-lapping generations and where mating occurs independently of the age group. Previous models studying the effect of perennial life-histories on the genetic properties of populations in the presence of self-fertilisation have done so considering age-dependent selection and have found that, contrary to empirical observations, perennial populations should exhibit lower levels of inbreeding depression. Here we propose a simple deterministic model in continuous time with selection at different fitness traits and feedback between population fitness and size. We find that a perennial life-history can result in high levels of inbreeding depression in spite of inbreeding, due to higher frequencies of heterozygous individuals at the adult stage. We also propose that there may be demographic advantages for self-fertilisation that are independent of reproductive success.