Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE)

Abstract: Seawater temperature rise is damaging coral reef ecosystems. There is growing evidence for the negative impact of rising temperatures on the survival of adult corals and their reproductive success. However, the effect of elevated temperatures on gametes remains scarcely studied. Here we tested the effect of the thermal priming of gametes on the fertilization success in experimentally tested populations of Acropora cytherea corals in French Polynesia. As expected, a temperature of 30 {\textdegree}C (ambient +3 {\textdegree}C) reduces coral fertilization success. However, the thermal exposure of gametes to 30 {\textdegree}C after their release in seawater prior to fertilization limited fertilization failure, with a greater impact of oocytes in comparison to sperm. This temperature is similar to temperatures observed in nature under the changing climate. Our findings imply that the thermal priming of early life stages, such as gametes may play a role in maintaining the coral fertilization success in spite of increasing seawater temperature.

Abstract: Our study is devoted to a four-compartment epidemic model of a constant population of independent random walkers. Each walker is in one of four compartments (S-susceptible, C-infected but not infectious (period of incubation), I-infected and infectious, R-recovered and immune) characterizing the states of health. The walkers navigate independently on a periodic 2D lattice. Infections occur by collisions of susceptible and infectious walkers. Once infected, a walker undergoes the delayed cyclic transition pathway S $\to$ C $\to$ I $\to$ R $\to$ S. The random delay times between the transitions (sojourn times in the compartments) are drawn from independent probability density functions (PDFs). We analyze the existence of the endemic equilibrium and stability of the globally healthy state and derive a condition for the spread of the epidemics which we connect with the basic reproduction number $R_0>1$. We give quantitative numerical evidence that a simple approach based on random walkers offers an appropriate microscopic picture of the dynamics for this class of epidemics.

Abstract: The classical model for the genealogies of a neutrally evolving population in a fixed is environment is due to Kingman. Kingman's coalescent process, which produces a binary tree, universally emerges from many microscopic models in which the variance in the number of offspring is finite. It is understood that power-law offspring distributions with infinite variance can result in a very different type of coalescent structure with merging of more than two lineages. Here we investigate the regime where the variance of the offspring distribution is finite but comparable to the population size. This is achieved by studying a model in which the logarithm offspring sizes has a stretched exponential form. Such offspring distributions are motivated by biology, where they emerges from a toy model of growth in a heterogenous environment, but also mathematics and statistical physics, where limit theorems and phase transitions for sums over random exponentials have seen considerable attention due to their appearance in the partition function of the Random Energy Model (REM). We find that the limit coalescent is a $\beta$-coalescent -- a previously studied model emerging from evolutionary dynamics models with heavy-tailed offspring distributions. We also discuss the interpretation of these results in terms of the REM.