Evolution and intraspecific competition. III. One-locus theory for small additive gene effects and multidimensional resource qualities (Q580231)

This paper continues earlier investigations performed by the authors [ibid. 26, 228-264 (1984; Zbl 0543.92014) and ibid. 18, 297-313 (1980; Zbl 0468.92013)] concerning the evolution at a single multiallelic locus that determines a character which is related to the exploitation of a food resource of the organism. These considerations are generalized to the case of a resource with a multidimensional instead of a one- dimensional spectrum and it turned out that the results are essentially the same: If the Gaussian utilization functions (describing the mean rate of resource exploitation for each genotype) are displaced from the optimum, then alleles that move the utilization mode closer to the resource mode will increase in frequency. If, however, the utilization modes for all genotypes are close to the resource mode, then in general polymorphic equilibria exist and segregate between 1 and \(m+1\) alleles, where m is the dimension of the resource description.