Sex ratio elasticity influences the selection of sex ratio strategy
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Animal Behavior, Ecology, Evolutionary Studies, Mathematical Biology
- Keywords
- Sex ratio strategy (SRS), Sex ratio elasticity (SRE), Local mate competition (LMC), Local resource competition (LRC), Evolutionary stable strategies (ESS)
- Copyright
- © 2016 Wang et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Sex ratio elasticity influences the selection of sex ratio strategy. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2166v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2166v1
Abstract
There are three sex ratio strategies (SRS) in nature—male-biased sex ratio, female-biased sex ratio and, equal sex ratio depending on the proportion of male offspring being greater than, less than, or equal to ½. The problem was already noted in Darwin’s (1859) “Origin of Species,” and it was R. A. Fisher (1930) who first explained why most species in nature display a sex ratio of ½. Consequent SRS theories such as Hamilton’s (1967) local mate competition (LMC) and Clark’s (1978) local resource competition (LRC) separately explained the observed deviations from the seemingly universal 1:1 ratio. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is not yet a unified theory that accounts for the mechanisms of the three SRS. Here, we introduce the price elasticity theory in economics to define sex ratio elasticity (SRE), and present an analytical model that derives three SRSs based on the following assumption: simultaneously existing competitions for both resources and mates influence the level of SRE in both sexes differently. Consequently, it is the difference (between two sexes) in the level of their sex ratio elasticity that leads to three different SRS. Our analytical results demonstrate that the elasticity-based model not only reveals a highly plausible mechanism that explains the evolution of SRS in nature, but also offers a novel framework for unifying two major classical theories (i.e., LMC & LRC) in the field of SRS research.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.