Kazuya Kobayashi, a lecturer at the Center for Field Science Education and Research, Kyoto University, theoretically shows the possibility that "sexual harassment" among the sexual selections seen in nature maintains biodiversity, and this theory is based on simulations. It has been shown to work well.

　"Sexual harassment" in ecology is the property of increasing the proportion of one's own children over competitors at the cost of reducing the number of children born, and male dragonflies relentlessly court females. Or, at the stigma of a plant's flower, pollen releases a substance that interferes with fertilization by other pollen.It is advantageous when competing for mating, but it is disadvantageous when the number of children is reduced when the competitors are absent and the mating is reliable.
In other words, when the number of individuals is large and competition for mating is fierce, "sexual harassment" occurs and the number of children is reduced, but when the number of individuals is small and competition does not occur, "sexual harassment" does not occur and children The number of will increase.As a result, "sexual harassment" becomes more intense in species with a large number of individuals, preventing an excessive increase in the number of individuals, and conversely, "sexual harassment" is less likely to occur in species with a small number of individuals, and the number of individuals tends to increase.

　Lecturer Kobayashi expresses this situation with mathematical formulas and analyzes the optimum degree of "sexual harassment" for the population of the organism.Simulations incorporating this mechanism have succeeded in demonstrating that hundreds of organisms can coexist for 10,000 generations if there is a sufficiently large space.
　In the future, he plans to verify the prediction of this theoretical model with actual organisms.

Paper information:[Journal of Ecology] Sexual harassment sustains biodiversity via producing negative density-dependent population growth