The emergence of insect protandry: a “natural” evolutionary computation application

When resources and their consumers have matching distributions in space or time, an ideal free distribution (IFD) is achieved, whereby each consumer receives the same amount of resource. In nature, both spatial and temporal IFDs are commonplace, with protandry in insects providing a popular textbook example of the latter. This research uses individual based population models and genetic algorithms to simulate the emergence of both general temporal IFDs and insect protandry. The results indicate that evolutionary computation with fitness proportionate reproduction in negative frequency dependent situations (e.g., resource sharing contexts) leads to the rapid emergence of IFDs. Since ideal free distributions constitute implicitly cooperative arrangements among heterogenous strategies competing for a common resource, this work illustrates the ability of simple genetic algorithms to simulate the emergence of organized polymorphic structures rather than a single maximally fit phenotype