Claus Rüffler: Adaptive evolutionary diversification in multivariate trait spaces - methodological advances and a case study

Abstract:

Adaptive Dynamics can be thought of as an extension of evolutionary game theory in which the pay-offs emerge naturally from an explicit ecological model. A classification of the possible evolutionary dynamics under this approach has been worked our more than 20 years ago for the case of a single quantitative evolving trait, i.e., for one-dimensional trait spaces, and one insight that has emerged from this approach is that phenotypic diversity can emerge generically through gradual evolutionary change as a result of negative frequency-dependent disruptive selection.

My presentation consists of two parts. In the first part, I present recent advances to extend the classification of the adaptive dynamics for the case of arbitrarily many jointly evolving quantitative traits, i.e., to multivariate trait spaces. In the second part, I present a case study in which we apply this methodology to a classical question in evolutionary ecology: the evolution of resource specialists vs resource generalists.