The potential existence of natal dispersal strategies depending on parental age has been suggested by Hamilton and May [Hamilton, W. D. and May, R. M. (1977) Nature 269, 578-581] for organisms whose survival rates decline with age. When competition between parent and offspring is strong, any individual should disperse a smaller fraction of its offspring when it ages. Here, we verify their verbal prediction. First, we determine the evolutionarily stable dispersal strategy conditional on parental age, associated with a particular senescence curve. We show that such a conditional dispersal strategy should evolve independently from the genotype controlling the offspring dispersal behavior. Second, studying a population of common lizards, we provide empirical evidence of a relation between dispersal of female offspring and maternal senescence, in agreement with our theoretical predictions.
CITATION STYLE
Ronce, O., Clobert, J., & Massot, M. (1998). Natal dispersal and senescence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 95(2), 600–605. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.95.2.600
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