Effect of compositional fluctuation on the survival of bet-hedging species

TL;DR

This paper investigates how compositional fluctuations in bet-hedging species influence their extinction risk in competitive environments, revealing a third contribution to risk beyond demographic and environmental factors.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of compositional fluctuation as a novel factor affecting the survival of bet-hedging species in ecological competition.

Findings

Compositional fluctuations increase extinction risk for bet-hedging species.

Environmental fluctuations can reduce extinction risk in small populations.

Different factors impact extinction risk depending on population size and environmental correlation.

Abstract

Understanding the coexistence of diverse species in a changing environment is an important problem in community ecology. Bet-hedging is a strategy that helps species survive in such changing environments. However, studies of bet-hedging have often focused on the expected long-term growth rate of the species by itself, neglecting competition with other coexisting species. Here we study the extinction risk of a bet-hedging species in competition with others. We show that there are three contributions to the extinction risk. The first is the usual demographic fluctuation due to stochastic reproduction and selection processes in finite populations. The second, due to the fluctuation of population growth rate caused by environmental changes, may counterintuitively reduce the extinction risk for small populations. Besides those two, we reveal a third contribution, which is unique to bet-hedging species that diversify into multiple phenotypes: The phenotype composition of the population will fluctuate over time, resulting in increased extinction risk. We compare such compositional fluctuation to the demographic and environmental contributions, showing how they have different effects on the extinction risk depending on the population size, generation overlap, and environmental correlation.