Aim There is mounting concern that climate change will lead to the collapse of cyclic population dynamics, yet the influence of climate variability on population cycling remains poorly understood. We hypothesized that variability in survival and fecundity, driven by climate variability at different points in the life cycle, scales up from local populations to drive regional characteristics of p...

Individual learning and social learning are two primary abilities supporting cultural evolution. Conditions for their evolution have mostly been studied by investigating gene frequency dynamics, which essentially implies constant population size. Predictions from such "static" models may only be of partial relevance to the evolution of advanced individual learning in modern humans, because mode...

Evidence for synchronous fluctuations of spatially separated populations is ubiquitous in the literature, including accounts within and across taxa. Among the few mechanisms explaining this phenomenon is the Moran effect, whereby independent populations are synchronized by spatially correlated environmental disturbances. The body of research on the Moran effect predominantly assumes that enviro...

In this paper, we consider a stoichiometric population model of two producers and one consumer. It is a generalization of the Rosenzweig-MacArthur population growth model, which is a one-producer, one-consumer population model without stoichiometry. The generalization involves two steps: 1) adding a second producer which competes with the first, and 2) introducing stoichiometry into the system....

The determination of whether purse seine fishing in the Eastern Tropical Pacific is hampering the recovery of the northeastern offshore spotted dolphin and eastern spinner dolphin populations is a difficult problem. The question was not answered satisfactorily by a simple consideration of population abundance estimates, despite these estimates being made using innovative methods and great care ...

Most population models assume that individuals within a given population are identical, that is, the fundamental role of variation is ignored. Here we develop a general approach to modeling heterogeneous populations with discrete evolutionary time step. The theory is applied to population dynamics of natural rotifer populations. We show that under particular conditions the behavior of the inhom...

Interacting populations exhibit complex behavior in nature. Classic quadratic iteration models with two or three populations exhibit some of the features seen in nature, but fail to account for spatial variation. Indeed, the diversity paradox is that many classic population models predict one species dominates while nature exhibits diversity. While various schemes have been presented to address...

Determining the factors that influence migratory population abundance has been constrained by the inability to connect events in different periods of the annual cycle. Carry-over effects are events that occur in one season but influence individual success the following season and recent empirical evidence suggests that they may play an important role in migratory population dynamics. Using a lo...

The early life history 7 Abstract The relationship between the biomass of reproductively mature individuals (spawning stock) and the resulting offspring added to the population (recruitment), the stock–recruitment relationship, is a fundamental and challenging problem in all of population biology. The steepness of this relationship is commonly defined as the fraction of recruitment from an unfi...

This paper studies population models which have the following three ingredients: populations are divided into local subpopulations, local population dynamics are noniinear and random events occur locally in space. In this setting local stochastic phenomena have a systematic effect on average population density and this effect does not disappear in large populations. This result is an outcome of...