Sensitivity of Self-Organized Speciation to Long-Disctance Dispersal

Previous work has shown that speciation can result from the self-organized accumulation of multiple mildly underdominant (nearly neutral) loci in a continuous population, when mating is spatially localized. In contrast, when mating is panmictic, underdominance is quickly eliminated and the population always converges on a single genotype, as predicted by mean-field approximations. The focus of this work is to examine the sensitivity of self-organizing speciation to the assumption of purely localized interactions. We alter the interaction topology from nearest neighbor interactions to panmictic interactions in two ways: (i) by increasing the size of the contiguous mating neighborhoods and (ii) by allowing for long-distance dispersal of individuals with increasing probability. Our results show self-organized speciation to be robust to mating neighborhood sizes significantly larger than nearest neighbor interactions and to probabilities of long-distance dispersal that fall well into the range of so called "small-world" interaction topologies