Effect of age structure and maternal selection in polymorphism maintenance on long-lived species under a cyclically changing environment

Maternal selection and overlapping generations can facilitate stable coexistence of alleles under temporally fluctuating environment. The work studies a complex effect of both factors under asymmetric cyclic selection, which simulates environment fluctuation by analogy of food resources cycles with rare peaks and prolonged decline of prey abundance. Our modeling intends to describe a situation demonstrated by the community of “arctic foxes - mouse-like rodents” and explain maintaining polymorphism on litter size in arctic fox.