Individual variability in dispersal and invasion speed

Abstract

We model the growth, dispersal and mutation of two phenotypes of a species using reaction-diffusion equations, focusing on the biologically realistic case of small mutation rates. After verifying that the addition of a small linear mutation rate to a Lotka-Volterra system limits it to only two steady states in the case of weak competition, an unstable extinction state and a stable coexistence state, we prove that under some biologically reasonable condition on parameters the spreading speed of the system is linearly determinate. Using this result we show that the spreading speed is a non-increasing function of the mutation rate and hence that greater mixing between phenotypes leads to slower propagation. Finally, we determine the ratio at which the phenotypes occur at the leading edge in the limit of vanishing mutation.