Evolutionary Distribution Dynamics Of Niche-constructing Traits

Niche construction is the ability of organisms to alter their biological and non-biological natural selection sources through their own metabolism,activities and selection behavior,part of the creation and partial destruction of their own or other organism’s evolutionary niche.The niche construction embodies the mutual feedback relationship between organisms and their environments in the evolutionary process.Through this feedback,evolution is regarded as the process of natural selection and niche construction,which leads to a series of evolutionary results such as evolutionary inertia,evolutionary momentum,autocatalytic effect,evolutionary delays,leading to the fixation of deleterious alleles,supporting stable polymorphism,and eliminating other stable polymorphisms or affect the instability of the evolutionary system.As the basic core theory of ecology,niche construction not only enriches existing evolutionary thought,but also provides a new theoretical basis for the study of species adaptability,and also provides an effective mechanism to explain evolutionary or ecological patterns of on different scales.So far,many current researches on the niche construction theory(NCT)is mainly based on the framework of two-locus populations genetic model of the framework of ecological model that was described as the ordinary differential equations enclosed organisms and their own environments,or on the experimental study.However,effective models that would embody the evolutionary significance of NCT.Therefore,this paper will take niche-constructing traits of organisms as the object of research and use one of the evolutionary invasion analysis methods-evolutionary distribution dynamics model to explore the evolutionary dynamics and the phenotypic distribution patterns of organisms,and their important influences on the species formation,the mechanism of polymorphic maintenance and the evolutionary stability conditions – these results will elucidate the great effects of niche construction of species on their evolutionary traits,and hence evaluate the significance of NCT for adaptive evolution of species.This paper is divided into four parts.The first part introduce the basic theory of adaptive dynamics and evolutionary dynamics,summarizes the basic content of niche construction and the current domestic and foreign research.The part second develops the evolutionary distributions model of a single species with trait construction,and performs numerical simulation.The results show that the evolutionary track of phenotypic trait is bifurcation(i.e.evolutionary branching).The initial phenotypic trait is gradually disappeared,and new subspecies are formed,so species present a diversity of differentiation characteristics.Different parameters in the system will affect the differentiation rate of species.However,in the case of asymmetric species,the diversity of species shows a decreasing trend,and the changes of trait density is different.The third part develops the coevolution dynamics model under the mutualistic system with niche construction.Through numerical simulation,we can reach the conclusion that the parameters such as intraspecific competition kernel and niche construction width et.al will have a significant on diversity.The fourth part is summary and outlook.In this paper,the dynamics model of evolutionary distribution is used for the first time in the study of niche construction theory,taking the evolution trait of the organism as the research target directly,and exploring its evolutionary dynamics and distribution pattern under the construction effect,which provides an effective theoretical support and rich research model for the further development of niche construction theory.