Sex ratio dependent dispersal when sex ratios vary between patches

Female biased sex ratios reduce competition between brothers when mating takes place within local patches. Male dispersal prior to mating is another strategy that reduces competition between brothers. One may thus expect these two traits to co-evolve and this is partially met in that sex ratios becomes less female biased as dispersal increases. However, the evolutionary stable degree of dispersal is unaffected by the sex ratio. The analytical models developed to reach these conclusions ignored variance in sex ratios, since this increases the structural complexity of models. For similar reasons finite clutch sizes are also routinely ignored. To overcome these shortfalls, we developed individual based simulations that allowed us to incorporate realistic clutch sizes and binomial variance in sex ratios between patches. We show that under variable sex ratios, males evolve to more readily disperse away from patches with higher sex ratios than lower sex ratios. We show that, while the dispersal rate is insensitive to the sex ratio when sex ratios are precise, it is affected by the number of males with dispersal decreasing as the number of males decreases. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.