Ake Brannstrom
(Nara Women's University)

05/12/01, 13:30 at Room 3631 (6th floor of building 3 of the Faculty of Sciences)

Dictyostelium is an amoeba which, when starvation is imminent, aggregates to form fruiting bodies consisting of a stalk of dead cells that supports spores. Since different clones may be involved in such aggregations, cheater strategies may emerge that allocate a smaller fraction of cells to stalk formation, thus gaining a reproductive advantage. We model the evolutionary dynamics under the realistic assumption that the number of clones involved in aggregations follows a random distribution, and show that under these assumptions evolutionary branching into cheater and altruist allocation strategies may occur.

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