Abstract

When a symbol or a type has been “frozen” (namely, a type of which an individual only produces one individual of the same type), its spread pattern will be changed and this change will affect the long-term behavior of the whole system. However, in a frozen system, the ξ-matrix and the offspring mean matrix are no longer primitive so that the Perron–Frobenius theorem cannot be applied directly when predicting the spread rates. In this paper, our goal is to characterize these key matrices and analyze the spread rate under more general settings both in the topological and random spread models with frozen symbols. More specifically, we propose an algorithm for explicitly computing the spread rate and relate the rate with the eigenvectors of the ξ-matrix or offspring mean matrix. In addition, we reveal that the growth of the population is exponential and that the composition of the population is asymptotically periodic. Furthermore, numerical experiments are provided as supporting evidence for the theory.