Evolution at the edge of expanding populations

Abstract Predicting the evolution of expanding populations is critical to controlling biological threats such as invasive species and cancer metastasis. Expansion is primarily driven by reproduction and dispersal, but nature abounds with examples of evolution where organisms pay a reproductive cost to disperse faster. When does selection favor this “survival of the fastest”? We searched for a simple rule, motivated by evolution experiments where swarming bacteria evolved into a hyperswarmer mutant that disperses ∼100% faster but pays a growth cost of ∼10% to make many copies of its flagellum. We analyzed a two-species model based on the Fisher equation to explain this observation: the population expansion rate (v) results from an interplay of growth (r) and dispersal (D) and is independent of the carrying capacity: v = 2 ( rD ) 1 / 2 . A mutant can take over the edge only if its expansion rate (v 2) exceeds the expansion rate of the established species (v 1); this simple condition ( v 2 > v 1 ) determines...