Complex interaction of resource availability, life-history and demography determines the dynamics and stability of stage-structured populations
Authored by Sudipta Tung, M Rajamani, Amitabh Joshi, Sutirth Dey
Date Published: 2019
DOI: 10.1016/j.jtbi.2018.10.019
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Abstract
The dynamics of stage-structured populations facing stage-specific
variability in resource availability and/or demographic factors like
unequal sex-ratios, remains poorly understood. We addressed these issues
using a stage-structured individual-based model that incorporates
life-history parameters common to many holometabolous insects. The model
was calibrated using time series data from a 49-generation experiment on
laboratory populations of Drosophila melanogaster, subjected to four
different combinations of larval and adult nutritional levels. The model
was able to capture multiple qualitative and quantitative aspects of the
empirical time series across three independent studies. We then
simulated the model to explore the interaction of various life-history
parameters and nutritional levels in determining population stability.
In all nutritional regimes, constancy stability of the populations was
reduced upon increasing egg-hatchability, critical mass, and proportion
of body resource allocated to female fecundity. However, the effects of
increasing sensitivity of female-fecundity to adult density on constancy
stability varied across nutrition regimes. The effects of unequal
sex-ratio and sex-specific culling were greatly influenced by fecundity
but not by levels of juvenile nutrition. Finally, we investigated the
implications of some of these insights on the efficiency of the
widely-used pest control method, the Sterile Insect Technique (SIT). We
show that increasing the amount of juvenile food had no effects on SIT
efficiency when the density-independent fecundity is low, but reduces
SIT efficiency when the density-independent fecundity is high. (C) 2018
Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Tags
Agent-based model
Individual-based model
Evolution
sterile insect technique
time-series
stability
Sex-ratio
Responses
Persistence
Limitation
Food availability
Drosophila
Metapopulations
Constancy
Fluctuation index
Minimum critical
size
Stage-structured model