The effect of migration on the viability, dynamics and structure of two coexisting metapopulations

Two species of butterflies, Euphydryas aurinia and Melitaea phoebe, coexist as two metapopulations in a 38-patch network in Hebei Province, China. A Markovian model, whose transition matrix is the product of two matrices which represent the local extinction and recolonization process respectively, is used to describe the metapopulation dynamics. The application of this model to the metapopulation, consisting of 12 local populations in the northern subregion, shows that the expected life times of E. aurinia and M. phoebe are 160 and 121 years respectively and usually nearly half of the patches are occupied by E. aurinia, while only 1–3 patches are occupied by M. phoebe. We claim that E. aurinia can persist for a long time while M. phoebe faces relatively big extinction risk. By comparing the population dynamics with and without migration, we find M. phoebe benefits much more from migration than E. aurinia. Most patches are occupied mainly by local populations for E. aurinia, while by immigrants from the 8th patch for M. phoebe, meaning that E. aurinia has a classical metapopulation structure while M. phoebe has a source–sink metapopulation structure.