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Summary: Selection 2 (2001) 12, 119131
Available online at http://www.akkrt.hu
Evolutionary Branching and the Evolution of Anisogamy
N. MAIRE1
, M. ACKERMANN1
and M. DOEBELI2
*
1
Zoology Institute, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland,
2
Department of Zoology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada
(Received: 17 May 2001,
Accepted: 20 August 2001)
Populations of most sexual species are anisogamous, i.e. they consist of two types of individuals producing gam-
etes of different size. The evolution of anisogamy is usually explained with models that either rely on mutations
with large effects or are based on populations with pre-existing mating types. Here we present a model for the
evolution of anisogamy that does not rely on either of those assumptions. We used the theory of adaptive dynam-
ics to study the evolution of gamete size allowing arbitrarily small mutations in a population without mating
types. As in previous models, we assumed that the survival of a zygote depends on its size, and therefore on the
sum of the sizes of the gametes that formed it, and we altered the form of this relationship to investigate a broad
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