Stilwell Peter, O'Brien Siobhan, Hesse Elze, Lowe Chris, Gardner Andy, Buckling Angus
Department of Biosciences University of Exeter Penryn TR10 9FE United Kingdom.
Institute of Integrative Biology University of Liverpool Liverpool L69 7ZB United Kingdom.
Evol Lett. 2020 Feb 4;4(2):155-163. doi: 10.1002/evl3.158. eCollection 2020 Apr.
Heterogeneity in resources is a ubiquitous feature of natural landscapes affecting many aspects of biology. However, the effect of environmental heterogeneity on the evolution of cooperation has been less well studied. Here, using a mixture of theory and experiments measuring siderophore production by the bacterium as a model for public goods based cooperation, we explore the effect of heterogeneity in resource availability. We show that cooperation in metapopulations that were spatially heterogeneous in terms of resources can be maintained at a higher level than in homogeneous metapopulations of the same average resource value. The results can be explained by a positive covariance between fitness of cooperators, population size, and local resource availability, which allowed cooperators to have a disproportionate advantage within the heterogeneous metapopulations. These results suggest that natural environmental variation may help to maintain cooperation.
资源异质性是自然景观中普遍存在的特征，影响着生物学的许多方面。然而，环境异质性对合作进化的影响尚未得到充分研究。在这里，我们结合理论和实验，以细菌产生铁载体作为基于公共物品的合作模型，探讨资源可用性异质性的影响。我们发现，在资源空间异质的集合种群中，合作水平能够维持在比具有相同平均资源值的同质集合种群更高的水平。这一结果可以通过合作者的适合度、种群大小和当地资源可用性之间的正协方差来解释，这使得合作者在异质集合种群中具有不成比例的优势。这些结果表明，自然环境变异可能有助于维持合作。
