The additional species is either an alternative prey or a higher-level predator that consumes the first predator species.
Results indicate that a variety of effects on predator-prey coevolution are possible.
In general, the additional species does not decouple evolutionary changes in the predator and the prey, and often leads to stronger coupling. The manner in which predator and prey adaptations combine to determine the predator's capture rate has a major effect on how an additional species influences the coevolutionary responses of the original pair of species. A detailed study is then presented of the cytonuclear dynamics, in a random-mating population under two different migration scenarios. In both cases closed-form solutions are given for all variables as a function of the initial conditions and relevant migration parameters. The dynamics of the gene frequencies and allelic disequilibria, which dominate each system, are the same as those involving two unlinked nuclear loci, while the dynamics of the genotypic disequilibria and cytonuclear frequencies have no nuclear counterpart.