Idea paper: Incorporating sexual differences in dispersal decision making into metapopulation theory

Abstract

Dispersal is crucial for both individual fitness and spatiotemporal population dynamics. In sexual organisms, females and males have different reproductive strategies and therefore have different reproductive demands (i.e., reproductive resources and mating partners, respectively), which leads to differences in dispersal decision making between sexes. Although many studies have described sexual differences in dispersal behavior, little is known about the consequences for spatiotemporal population dynamics because metapopulation theory has considered only either nonrandom dispersal in asexual systems or random dispersal in sexual systems. To fill the knowledge gap, we propose a modeling framework that incorporates nonrandom and sex‐specific dispersal into metapopulation theory. It allows us to ask how female‐biased (e.g., in mammals) or male‐biased (e.g., in birds) dispersal can influence persistence of sexual organisms.