Fig. 1: Aethionema arabicum sub-habitats and dimorphic dispersal strategy (not to scale). Aethionema arabicum is a dimorphic plant species that grows along steep stony slopes in the Anatolian Mountains and produces a ratio of dispersing and non-dispersing offspring, dependent on the ambient temperature of the native sub-habitat (Lenser et al. , 2016).
Distributing offspring across sub-habitats can increase fitness and allows population survival in environments where they could not without dispersal (Jansen and Yoshimura, 1998). If an organism can sense which sub-habitat it resides in, is it adaptive to have dispersal strategies that are contingent on the sub-habitat? Here we show theoretically how individuals altering their dispersal ratio in response to localised environmental variability could be aided through sensing. We develop a theoretical approach for sub-habitats that differ in their environmental variability. We show that site-specific dispersal ratios, aided by sensing, are adaptive in response to differences between sub-habitats, and therefore there is selection for traits that possess this ability.