Fixation properties of rock-paper-scissors games in fluctuating populations (Q2308851)

In a static environment, the fixation probabilities in rock-paper-scissors games obey two different laws: the law of the weakest (LOW) dictates that the species with the lowest payoff are most likely to fixate in large populations, while the other law (``law of stay out'', LOSO) occurs in small populations. This paper examined how this scenario changes with the combination of demographic and environmental noise. The randomness of the environment is introduced here through random bandwidth switching (dichotomous Markov noise), which simulates how the available resources continually switch between scarcity and abundance. The authors studied the process of birth and death, in which a fluctuating population of three species, competing cyclically, is subject to either constant or random changes in carrying capacity. Since demographic fluctuations (internal noise) depend on population size, which in turn depends on switching capacity, internal noise and environmental noise are combined here. The size of the fluctuating constellation can depend on LOW (weak internal noise) or LOSO (stronger internal noise), or it can switch between values according to one law and then another. This can have a profound effect on fixation properties: it is unclear which species are most likely to dominate when population size fluctuates, and as a result depends on environmental variability. These issues were explored in detail for a zero-sum rock-paper-scissors game, equivalent to the Lotka-Volterra cyclic model (CLV). When the CLV is subject to an arbitrarily switchable bearing capacity, the fixation probabilities can be expressed in terms of the fixation probabilities of the CLV at a suitable constant bearing capacity. This allowed us to analyze in detail how the variance and rate of change in load-carrying capacity affect the fixation properties of CLVs. The general effect of random switching has been found to balance out the selection and ``level the field'' of cyclical competition: in particular, when the switching speed is high, the effect of environmental noise is reduced to an effective reduction in selection by a factor that increases with changing bearing capacity. Consequently, when bandwidth is widely scattered, LOW becomes a zero-or-one law only for a much larger average population than without switching. We also identified new fixation scenarios, not obeying neither the LOSO nor the LOW.The authors examined rock-paper-paper games with a sum close to zero and showed that fixation probabilities can be derived from those for CLV by appropriately scaling the selection intensity.