Dario Spanò (University of Warwick)

On the ancestral process of long-range seed bank models

It has been observed that, in some bacterial species, spores may remain dormant for a long time, to wake up much later, even up to “order of population size” generations later. When they wake up, they can still participate in the population’s reproduction. This incredibly relaxed attitude causes a relaxation of the population’s Markov property, forward in time. I will describe some results about the genealogical process of seed bank models which, in the scaling limit (as the population size tends to infinity), may differ dramatically from the well-known Kingman’s Coalescent process. The genealogy can be derived from the properties of a system of certain types of Polya urns containing balls undergoing some sort of random erosion.

Joint work with J. Blath, A. Gonzales-Casanova, N. Kurt.