How Spatial Locality Can Affect the Evolution of Niche Construction

Niche construction is a process whereby organisms that modify their own or the others’ niches through their ecological activities. It is getting much attention in evolutionary studies but still poorly understood. Our purpose is to clarify the effects of spatial locality of niche construction on the evolution of the niche-constructing trait. Especially, we focus on the evolution of negative niche construction that reduces the fitness of niche-constructing individuals themselves. We constructed an evolutionary model by introducing a negative niche-construction of cooperative individuals that reduces their payoff values into Nowak and May’s spatial model of the evolution of strategies for Prisoner’s Dilemma. We found that the evolution of negative niche-constructing trait is drastically affected by the degree of spatial locality of niche construction. When the locality of niche construction was high, the small number of cooperative and negative niche-constructing individuals could survive due to the unexpected effect of negative niche construction, that is the stabilization of their local environments. When the locality of niche construction was sufficiently low or completely global, the negative nicheconstructing trait counterintuitively became dominant in the population of cooperative individuals by changing the global property of the population such as the robustness against invasion by mutant individuals.