Speaker
Description
It has become increasingly evident that evolution can take place in ecological time scales. One such example is that of evolution of dispersal during range expansion. As individuals with higher motility get to the leading edge faster, if these individuals benefit from low competition therein, they reproduce, and their offspring are then equally able to colonize unexplored regions. Over time, individuals at the leading edge become much better at dispersal than their conspecifics at the range core, leading to faster spread of the population. This has been observed in nature for some species, most notoriously the cane toads in north Australia and red-shouldered soapberry bugs in Texas, USA, but also tested experimentally in bacteria, mites, bean bugs and thale cress. In light of such observations and the challenge they present in our understanding of range expansions, mathematical perspectives that once relied on describing population dispersal based on average phenotypes began to account for population variability in dispersal. In this talk, I plan to go over some of such models and some of our contributions, and show how evolution changes population asymptotic spreading speeds and leading edge population trait distributions during range expansion.
