  In environments that vary frequently and unpredictably, bet-hedgers can
overtake the population. Diversifying bet-hedgers have a diverse set of
offspring so that, no matter the conditions they find themselves in, at least
some offspring will have high fitness. In contrast, conservative bet-hedgers
have a set of offspring that all have an in-between phenotype compared to the
specialists. Here, we use an evolutionary algorithm of gene regulatory networks
to de novo evolve the two strategies and investigate their relative success in
different parameter settings. We found that diversifying bet-hedgers almost
always evolved first, but then eventually got outcompeted by conservative
bet-hedgers. We argue that even though similar selection pressures apply to the
two bet-hedger strategies, conservative bet-hedgers could win due to the
robustness of their evolved networks, in contrast to the sensitive networks of
the diversifying bet-hedgers. These results reveal an unexplored aspect of the
evolution of bet-hedging that could shed more light on the principles of
biological adaptation in variable environmental conditions.
