Studies of small water fleas help ecologists understand population dynamics

October 30, 2008 in /



Co-author Roger Nisbet, an ecologist based at the University of California, Santa Barbara, explained that a few animal populations, notably some insects, show huge "boom and bust" cycles. The populations alternate between periods of explosive growth when food is plentiful, followed by crashes when food is replaced too slowly to support the resulting large population.

This behavior is well understood by ecologists, and has been described by many simple mathematical models. However, most animal populations don't behave in this extreme way. "A key question is why," said Nisbet.



McCauley was able to study the performance of individual water fleas within lab populations. Some of these were executing boom and bust cycles; others were not. This second group of populations exhibited what the investigators called "small amplitude" cycles.

work by Bill Nelson, co-author from Queens University in Ontario, was that in the small amplitude cycles, individual animals would take much longer to develop to reproductive maturity. This was confirmed by the new experiments.



Source: University of California - Santa Barbara

"Studies of small water fleas help ecologists understand population dynamics" October 30, 2008 https://phys.org/news/2008-10-small-fleas-ecologists-population-dynamics.html