Feisty fish and birds with attitude: Why does evolution not lead to identical individuals?

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25250/thescbr.brk793

Keywords:

Evolution, individual variation, competition, resources

Abstract

Natural selection is often thought to “perfect” an organism. Yet, real organisms show lots of diversity in their behaviours and morphology. We show that competition for resources can either maintain trait diversity at a constant high level, or lead to wild cycles in trait evolution. Continuous differences in resources like those found in nature are an important part of these outcomes.

Author Biographies

Lukas Eigentler, University of Warwick

Assistant Professor

Klaus Reinhold, Bielefeld University

Professor

David W. Kikuchi, Oregon State University

Assistant Professor

Original article reference

K. Reinhold, L. Eigentler, David W. Kikuchi: Evolution of individual variation in a competitive trait: a theoretical analysis. J. Evol. Biol. voae036, DOI: 10.1093/jeb/voae036

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Published

2024-08-29

Issue

Vol. 10 No. 3 (2024): TheScienceBreaker

Section

Evolution & Behaviour

License

Some rights reserved 2024 Lukas Eigentler, Klaus Reinhold, David W. Kikuchi

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.