THE INTERACTIVE EFFECTS OF PARASITES, DISTURBANCE, AND PRODUCTIVITY ON EXPERIMENTAL ADAPTIVE RADIATIONS

Abstract Disturbance, productivity, and natural enemies are significant determinants of the evolution of diversity, but their interactive effect remains unresolved. We develop a simple, qualitative model assuming trade-offs between growth rate, competitive ability and parasite resistance, to address the interactive effects of these variables on the evolution of host diversity. Consistent with previous studies our model predicts maximum diversity at intermediate levels of disturbance and productivity in the absence of parasitism. However, parasites break down these unimodal diversity relationships with productivity and disturbance, as selection for parasite resistance reduces the importance of growth rate-competitive ability trade-offs. We tested these predictions using the bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens, which undergoes an adaptive radiation into spatial niche specialists under laboratory conditions. This is the first study of adaptive radiation in response to experimental manipulation of the three-way...