Emergence of a dynamic resource partitioning based on the coevolution of phenotypic plasticity in sympatric species

This paper investigates the coevolutionary dynamics of the phenotypic plasticity in the context of overlap avoidance behaviors of shared niches in sympatric species. Especially, we consider whether and how a differentiation of phenotypic plasticity can emerge under the assumption that there are no initial asymmetric relationships among coevolving species. We construct a minimal model where several different species participate in a partitioning of their shared niches, and evolve their behavioral plasticity to avoid an overlap of their niche use. By conducting evolutionary experiments with various conditions of the number of species and niches, we show that the two different types of asymmetric distributions of phenotypic plasticity emerge depending on the settings of the degree of congestion of the shared niches. In both cases, all species tended to obtain the similar amount of fitness regardless of such differences in their plasticity. We also show that the emerged distributions are coevolutionarily stable in general.