Selection on sporulation strategies in a metapopulation can lead to coexistence.

In constant environments, the coexistence of similar species or genotypes is generally limited. In a metapopulation context, however, types that utilize the same resource but are distributed along a competition-colonization trade-off can coexist. Prior work used a generic trade-off between within-deme competitive ability and between-deme dispersal ability. We show that sporulation in yeasts and other microbes can create a natural trade-off such that strains that initiate sporulation at higher rates suffer in terms of within-deme competition but benefit in terms of between deme dispersal. Using chemostat dynamics within patches, we first show that the rate of sporulation determines the colonization ability of the strain, with colonization ability increasing with sporulation rate up to a point. Metapopulation stability of a single strain exists in a defined range of sporulation rates. We pairwise invasability plots to show that coexistence of strains with different sporulation rates generally occurs, but that the set of sporulation rates that can potentially coexist is smaller than the set that allows for stable metapopulations. We also show how a continuous set of strains can coexist and verify our conclusions with numerical calculations and stochastic simulations. Stable variation in sporulation rates is expected under a wide range of ecological conditions.