The shape of a seed bank tree

Abstract: We derive the asymptotic behavior of the total, active and inactive branch lengths of the seed bank coalescent, when the size of the initial sample grows to infinity. Those random variables have important applications for populations evolving under some seed bank effects, such as plants and bacteria, and for some cases of structured populations like metapopulations. The proof relies on the study of the tree at a stopping time corresponding to the first time that a deactivated lineage reactivates. We also give conditional sampling formulas for the random partition and we study the system at the time of the first deactivation of a lineage. All these results provide a good picture of the different regimes and behaviors of the block-counting process of the seed bank coalescent.