Strategies of offspring investment and dispersal in a spatially structured environment: a theoretical study using ants

Abstract

Background

Offspring investment strategies vary markedly between and within taxa, and much of this variation is thought to stem from the trade-off between offspring size and number. While producing larger offspring can increase their competitive ability, this often comes at a cost to their colonization ability. This competition–colonization trade-off (CCTO) is thought to be an important mechanism supporting coexistence of alternative strategies in a wide range of taxa. However, the relative importance of an alternative and possibly synergistic mechanism—spatial structuring of the environment—remains the topic of some debate. In this study, we explore the influence of these mechanisms on metacommunity structure using an agent-based model built around variable life-history traits. Our model combines explicit resource competition and spatial dynamics, allowing us to tease-apart the influence of, and explore the interaction between, the CCTO and the spatial structure of the environment. We test our model using two reproductive strategies which represent extremes of the CCTO and are common in ants.

Results

Our simulations show that colonisers outperform competitors in environments subject to higher temporal and spatial heterogeneity and are favoured when agents mature late and invest heavily in reproduction, whereas competitors dominate in low-disturbance, high resource environments and when maintenance costs are low. Varying life-history parameters has a marked influence on coexistence conditions and yields evolutionary stable strategies for both modes of reproduction. Nonetheless, we show that these strategies can coexist over a wide range of life-history and environmental parameter values, and that coexistence can in most cases be explained by a CCTO. By explicitly considering space, we are also able to demonstrate the importance of the interaction between dispersal and landscape structure.

Conclusions

The CCTO permits species employing different reproductive strategies to coexist over a wide range of life-history and environmental parameters, and is likely to be an important factor in structuring ant communities. Our consideration of space highlights the importance of dispersal, which can limit the success of low-dispersers through kin competition, and enhance coexistence conditions for different strategies in spatially structured environments.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12898-016-0058-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Contributors

Adam L. Cronin:

ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2075-1138

[phone] , [e-mail]

Nicolas Loeuille: [e-mail]

Thibaud Monnin: [e-mail]

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): BMC Ecol

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): BMC Ecol

Title: BMC Ecology

Publisher: BioMed Central (London )

ISSN (Electronic): 1472-6785

Publication date (Electronic): 5 February 2016

Publication date PMC-release: 5 February 2016

Publication date Collection: 2016

Volume: 16

Affiliations

[ ]United Graduate School of Agricultural Sciences, Iwate University, 3-18-8 Ueda, Morioka, 020-8550 Japan

[ ]UMR 7618 Institute of Ecology and Environmental Sciences of Paris, Sorbonne Universités, UPMC Univ Paris 06, 7 quai St Bernard, 75 252 Paris, France

Article

Publisher ID: 58

DOI: 10.1186/s12898-016-0058-z

PMC ID: 4743417

PubMed ID: 26847456

SO-VID: aa6f9379-cbe3-40c8-b6c8-b6b041ef6848

Copyright statement: © Cronin et al. 2016

License:

Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver ( http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

Funding

Funded by: FundRef http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001691, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JP);

Award ID: 25440187

Award Recipient : Adam L. Cronin

Categories

Subject: Research Article

Custom metadata

issue-copyright-statement © The Author(s) 2016