Insularity and adaptation in coupled victim-enemy associations

Employing a mathematical model we show how insularity, genotypic interactions and victim life-history/demography can influence adaptation in a simple enemy-victim interaction where genotypes migrate between a large source and a smaller, initially unoccupied, isolated habitat. We find that when there are explicit costs to heightened enemy virulence and victim resistance, large/close islands resemble their immigration sources, whereas small and/or distant islands tend to be occupied only by the least defended victims and least virulent enemies. In a model with no explicit cost to genotypic identity, frequencies do not differ on average between source and island. Despite these trends in genotype frequencies, for a range of realistic conditions, both cost and cost-free genotypic interactions yield an increase in the frequency of resistant encounters as a function of isolation. Moreover, in models with explicit costs, maximal island to island variation in genotypic frequencies is found on islands of intermediate distance from the source. In contrast, the model without explicit costs produces more variable communities, attaining maximum variability in genotypic frequencies at the most isolated islands. We hypothesize that adaptive patterns in mainland-island comparisons may differ substantially from those generated by centre-periphery comparisons in continental systems.