From nest site lottery to host lottery: continuous model of growth suppression driven by the availability of nest sites for newborns or hosts for parasites and its impact on the selection of life history strategies

Optimal allocation in annual plants with density dependent fitness

“…More generally, effects of selectively neutral juvenile mortality can be captured by S(y). Even simple known mechanisms that lead to mixed fitness measures, such as the nest site lottery [2,3] and its generalization, the host lottery that models parasitism [4], have close analogs for annual plants. For example, a limited number of sites for establishment [9] would result in a fixed carrying capacity of the environment (in the mechanistic sense of [21] rather than the phenomenological sense of the logistic growth model).…”

“…Moreover, if the environment is fluctuating then both types of selection might be contributing to the final outcome, and the environment itself might be affected by the selection taking place. More recent modeling suggests that fluctuating environments and density dependent feedbacks lead to transitions between fitness measures such as r and R 0 , and to maximizing mixed or hybrid measures that interpolate between the two [3,4,14,17,29]. Competition between different genotypes means that only relative difference in reproduction across competing genotypes matters, which implies diminishing returns on selective advantage from its increase [16].…”

“…Furthermore, the notions of r and K selection are linked to the classical logistic model, which has been criticized for including obscure phenomenological parameters and unrealistic predictions at the equilibrium. A recent model of nest site lottery, proposed in [2] and developed in [3,4], gives a deeper insight into actual demography and differences in selection for unsuppressed and suppressed growth, which stand behind the intuitions for r and K selection, respectively. It provides an example of a mechanism of selectively neutral growth suppression acting on the recruitment of juveniles (seeds and seedlings in the case of annual plants), and shows that transitional fitness measures should reflect more than just a difference in averaging.…”