Evolution of Plastic Dispersal in Stable Environment: Local Information of Fitness Consequence

Wayne Liang; Rufus Johnstone

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arXiv · 2601.03619

Evolution of Plastic Dispersal in Stable Environment: Local Information of Fitness Consequence

Wayne Liang·Rufus Johnstone

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Abstract

Fitness consequence of dispersal depends on property of the entire landscape, which patches are available and what are the cost of moving. These are information that are not available locally when an organism make the decision to disperse. This poses a problem to the organism, where it is unclear how an adaptive decision can be made. This also poses a problem to the scientist, since in order to study the adaptiveness of dispersal, we need information of the entire landscape. For theorist, this is through making a series of assumption about either the landscape or the organism, and for empiricists, this means a large amount of measurements needs to be made across a large area. In this paper, we propose a link between local demographic process, which an organism can have access to, to the fitness consequence of dispersal. This meant local environmental cue can be used for the decision on dispersal, and hence allow the evolution of plastic dispersal strategy. We will then show that using this approach, evolution of dispersal on complex landscape can be modelled with relative ease, and to show that accidental dispersal in one patch can drive the evolution of adaptive dispersal in another.

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Wayne Liang, Rufus Johnstone. 2026-01-07. Evolution of Plastic Dispersal in Stable Environment: Local Information of Fitness Consequence. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.03619

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