Time-dependent fitness effects can drive bet-hedging populations extinct

4 To survive unpredictable environmental change, many organisms adopt bet-hedging 5 strategies that trade short-term population growth for long-term fitness benefits. Be6 cause the benefits of bet-hedging may manifest over long time intervals, bet-hedging 7 strategies may be out-competed by strategies maximizing short-term fitness. Here, we 8 investigate the interplay between two drivers of selection, environmental fluctuations 9 and competition for limited resources, on different bet-hedging strategies. We consider 10 an environment with frequent disasters that switch between which phenotypes they 11 affect in a temporally-correlated fashion. We determine how organisms that stochasti12 cally switch between phenotypes at different rates fare in both competition and survival. 13 When disasters are correlated in time, the best strategy for competition is among the 14 worst for survival. Since the time scales over which the two agents of selection act are 15 1 peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not . http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/054007 doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online May. 18, 2016;