Stability of fixed life histories to perturbation by rare diapause (1809.04027v1)

Abstract: We follow up on a companion work that considered growth rates of populations growing at different sites, with different randomly varying growth rates at each site, in the limit as migration between sites goes to 0. We extend this work here to the special case where the maximum average log growth rate is achieved at two different sites. The primary motivation is to cover the case where `sites' are understood as age classes for the same individuals. The theory then calculates the effect on growth rate of introducing a rare delay in development, a diapause, into an otherwise fixed-length semelparous life history. Whereas the increase in stochastic growth rate due to rare migrations was found to grow as a power of the migration rate, we show that under quite general conditions that in the diapause model --- or in the migration model with two or more sites having equal individual stochastic growth rates --- the increase in stochastic growth rate due to diapause at rate $\epsilon$ behaves like $(\log \epsilon^{-1})^{-1}$ as $\epsilon\downarrow 0$. In particular, this implies that a small random disruption to the deterministic life history will always be favored by natural selection, in the sense that it will increase the stochastic growth rate relative to the zero-delay deterministic life history.