Higher fitness bestowed upon those alleles that are found in lower prevalence within a population.

The stabilizing part of stabilizing frequency-dependent selection refers to the stability of polymorphisms, as in the balanced populations. Stabilizing frequency-dependent selection is also described as or .

Otherwise stabilizing frequency-dependent selection is what one typically pictures when considering frequency-dependent selection, that is, without the "stabilizing" qualification. Contrast, however, disruptive frequency-dependent selection.

See also selection, natural selection, disruptive selection and diversifying selection. Contrast with stabilizing selection.

By way of example:

It is likely to be too costly to be resistant to all bacteriocins at once, and the probability of resistance will be lowest with respect to rare bacteriocins. As such, rare bacteriocin alleles will increase in frequency, allowing to be maintained.

can be more beneficial, however, only to the extent that they are beneficial at all:

When both producers and sensitive strains are rare there will only be limited interaction between them and there will be little benefit in producing toxins… When susceptibles are sufficiently rare, the and colicin models [both serving as antibacterial toxin] converge as the phage ceases to gain any multiplicative advantage due to the rarity of susceptibles, acting purely through its direct killing effect… Modelling work by Gardner et al. showed that the evolution of bacteriocin production should be most favoured when producers and sensitives interact locally at intermediate frequencies. When toxin producers are locally scarce, they are unable to generate sufficient chemical weapons (and therefore sufficient ) to compensate for the cost of production. In contrast when toxin producers are locally dominant, producing toxins has little benefit as there are few competitors to kill, and hence less available resources to gain from their death. Only when producers are at intermediate local frequencies will bacteriocin production confer the greatest , by maximising gains from competitive escape for a given investment in killing.