Elaine Crooks

We consider a reaction-diffusion system modelling the growth, dispersal and mutation of two phenotypes, focusing on the biologically realistic case of small mutation rates. This model was proposed in by Elliott and Cornell (2012), who presented evidence that for a class of dispersal and growth coefficients and a small mutation rate, the two phenotypes spread into the unstable extinction state at a single speed that is faster than either phenotype would spread in the absence of mutation. We exploit the fact that  the spreading speed of the system is determined by the linearisation about the extinction state to prove that the spreading speed is a non-increasing function of the mutation rate (implying that greater mixing between phenotypes leads to slower propagation), determine the ratio at which the phenotypes occur in the leading edge in the limit of vanishing mutation, and discuss the effect of trade-offs between dispersal and growth on the spreading speed of the phenotypes. This talk is based on joint work with Luca Börger and Aled Morris (Swansea).