A great deal is known about the evolution of dispersal in response to intra-specific interactions (e.g., kin competition, inbreeding avoidance), but relatively little is known about the evolution of dispersal in response to inter-specific interactions (e.g., resource competition, predation/parasitism). Elucidating the impact of inter-specific interactions on dispersal evolution becomes all the more important in light of recent ecological studies suggesting the existence of keystone dispersers, species whose dispersal strategy and behavior have a disproportionately large effect on other species in the community. Results/Conclusions
We investigate the evolution of dispersal in communities structured by competition and predation. We employ metacommunity models with explicit local dynamics, and emigration and immigration occurring on the same time scale as species interactions. We pay particular attention to the cues that organisms use to detect fitness differences between patches (e.g., density, resource availability), and investigate the degree to which information limitation constrains the evolution of dispersal.
