There are a variety of proposed evolutionary and ecological explanations for why some species have more extensive geographical ranges than others. One of the most common explanations is variation in species' dispersal ability. However, the purported relationship between dispersal distance and range size has been subjected to few theoretical investigations, and empirical tests reach conflicting ...

Dispersal is the movement of organisms across space, which has important implications for ecological and evolutionary processes, including community composition and gene flow. Previous studies have demonstrated that dispersal is influenced by body condition; however, few studies have been able to separate the effects of body condition from correlated variables such as body size. Moreover, the r...

We address the conflict in earlier results regarding the relationship between dispersal potential and range size. We examine all published pelagic larval duration data for tropical reef fishes. Larval duration is a convenient surrogate for dispersal potential in marine species that are sedentary as adults and that therefore only experience significant dispersal during their larval phase. Such e...

0003-3472 2012 The Association for the Study of A http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2012.11.014 In 1980, Paul J. Greenwoodpublished a reviewof dispersal in birds andmammals that has beenwidelycited. The review evaluated possible explanations for sex-biased natal dispersal. It concluded that female-biased dispersal occurred in socially monogamous birds because males were using territorial reso...

Movement of individuals influences individual reproductive success, fitness, genetic diversity and relationships among individuals within populations and gene exchange among populations. Competition between males or females for mating opportunities and/or local resources predicts a female bias in taxa with monogamous mating systems and a male-biased dispersal in polygynous species. In birds and...

In fragmented but temporally stable landscapes, kin competition selects for dispersal when habitat patches are small, whereas the loss of dispersal is favoured when dispersal is costly and local populations are large enough for kin interactions to be negligible. In heterogeneous landscapes with both small and large patches, contrasting levels of kin competition facilitate the coexistence of low...

BACKGROUND Aedes aegypti, the principal vector of dengue fever, have been genetically engineered for use in a sterile insect control programme. To improve our understanding of the dispersal ecology of mosquitoes and to inform appropriate release strategies of 'genetically sterile' male Aedes aegypti detailed knowledge of the dispersal ability of the released insects is needed. METHODOLOGY/PRI...

We study the dynamics of a reaction-diffusion-advection model for two competing species in a spatially heterogeneous environment. The two species are assumed to have the same population dynamics but different dispersal strategies: both species disperse by random diffusion and advection along the environmental gradient, but with different random dispersal and/or advection rates. Given any advect...

One of the central questions of metacommunity theory is how dispersal of organisms affects species diversity. Here, we show that the diversity-dispersal relationship should not be studied in isolation of other abiotic and biotic flows in the metacommunity. We study a mechanistic metacommunity model in which consumer species compete for an abiotic or biotic resource. We consider both consumer sp...