 Evolutionarily stable levels of aposematic defence in prey populationsAlan Scaramangas, Mark Broom, Graeme D. Ruxton and Anna Rouviere Theoretical Population Biology, 2023, vol. 153, issue C, 15-36 Abstract: Our understanding of aposematism (the conspicuous signalling of a defence for the deterrence of predators) has advanced notably since its first observation in the late nineteenth century. Indeed, it extends the scope of a well-established game-theoretical model of this very same process both from the analytical standpoint (by considering regimes of varying background mortality and colony size) and from the practical standpoint (by assessing its efficacy and limitations in predicting the evolution of prey traits in finite simulated populations). The nature of the manuscript at hand is more mathematical and its aim is two-fold: first, to determine the relationship between evolutionarily stable levels of defence and signal strength under various regimes of background mortality and colony size. Second, to compare these predictions with simulations of finite prey populations that are subject to random local mutation. We compare the roles of absolute resident fitness, mutant fitness and stochasticity in the evolution of prey traits and discuss the importance of population size in the above. Keywords: Aposematism; ESS; Chemical defence; Numerical simulation (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:thpobi:v:153:y:2023:i:c:p:15-36 DOI: 10.1016/j.tpb.2023.03.001 Access Statistics for this article Theoretical Population Biology is currently edited by Jeremy Van Cleve More articles in Theoretical Population Biology from Elsevier |
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