Speaker
Description
Modern coexistence theory (MCT) has been the mainstay of coexistence research in recent years. While competition creates evolutionary changes in traits that affect coexistence, it can also induce rapid plastic changes in individuals. However, a generalised framework that integrates both plasticity and evolution into MCT is lacking. Here, we incorporated competition-induced plasticity into a generalised eco-evolutionary Lotka-Volterra two-species competition model based on quantitative genetic inheritance. We analysed how abiotic environmental breadth modulates the effect of plasticity on the evolution of coexistence. We find that for a broad environment, adaptive plasticity accelerates evolution to coexistence, whereas maladaptive plasticity hinders it. By contrast, for a narrower environment, adaptive plasticity can hinder coexistence when competition width is comparable to abiotic environmental breadth. We find that in narrower environments, the direction of evolutionary change can oppose the direction of plastic trait responses, ultimately shifting the balance between niche overlap and fitness differences and thus affecting coexistence. Our results show that plasticity can reshape the eco-evolutionary trajectories to coexistence and highlight the importance of integrating short-term plastic responses with long-term evolutionary dynamics.
