The evolution of optimal emergence times: bet hedging and the quest for an ideal free temporal distribution of individuals

Proper timing of activities is one of the principal challenges faced by most organisms. Organisms need to account for various aspects in decision making like avoiding inordinate risks, synchronizing with resource availability, or finding mates. We provide analytical and simulation models to investigate the influence of life expectancy, resource competition and unpredictable environmental conditions (environmental uncertainty) on the evolutionarily stable distribution of emergence times in organisms depending on seasonally available resources. We focus on the partitioning of total phenotypic variance in emergence times into 1) genetic variance in mean emergence times between lineages and 2) environmental trait variance that determines the intra-lineage variance in the timing of emergence.

Both life expectancy of organisms and intensity of competition severely influence the evolutionary response to environmental uncertainty. Our main findings can be summarized as follows: 1) in general...