Evolutionarily stable strategies to overcome Allee effect in predator–prey interaction

Abstract

Every successful species invasion is facilitated by both ecological and evolutionary mechanisms. The evolution of population’s fitness related traits acts as functional adaptations to Allee effects. This trade-off increases predatory success at an expense of elevated death rate of potential predators. We address our queries employing an eco-evolutionary modeling approach that provides a means of circumventing inverse density-dependent effect. In the absence of evolution, the ecological system potentially exhibits multi-stable configurations under identical ecological conditions by allowing different bifurcation scenarios with the Allee effect. The model predicts a high risk of catastrophic extinction of interacting populations around different types of saddle-node bifurcations resulting from the increased Allee effect. We adopt the game-theoretic approach to derive the analytical conditions for the emergence of evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) when the ecological system possesses asymptotically stable steady states as well as population cycles. We establish that ESSs occur at those values of adopted evolutionary strategies that are local optima of some functional forms of model parameters. Overall, our theoretical study provides important ecological insights in predicting successful biological invasions in the light of evolution.