Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

André M. de Roos is professor of theoretical ecology at the University of Amsterdam. Lennart Persson is professor of aquatic ecology at Umeå University in Sweden.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"This important and timely book is the best discussion of structured population modeling currently available. De Roos and Persson are true experts in this field and their arguments have particularly significant implications in both applied and basic ecology. Very few others could write such a book."--Alan Hastings, University of California, Davis

"This is probably the most important new book on animal population dynamics to appear in a decade. It provides a lucid exposition of a coherent, individual-based approach to population dynamics based on fundamental bioenergetic principles. This book has the potential to become a classic."--Roger M. Nisbet, coauthor of Consumer-Resource Dynamics

Aus dem Klappentext

"This important and timely book is the best discussion of structured population modeling currently available. De Roos and Persson are true experts in this field and their arguments have particularly significant implications in both applied and basic ecology. Very few others could write such a book."--Alan Hastings, University of California, Davis

"This is probably the most important new book on animal population dynamics to appear in a decade. It provides a lucid exposition of a coherent, individual-based approach to population dynamics based on fundamental bioenergetic principles. This book has the potential to become a classic."--Roger M. Nisbet, coauthor of Consumer-Resource Dynamics

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Population and Community Ecology of Ontogenetic Development

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface............................................................................................................................................................ix1. Summary: A Bird's-Eye View of Community and Population Effects of Ontogenetic Development.......................................................................32. Life History Processes, Ontogenetic Development, and Density Dependence.........................................................................................243. Biomass Overcompensation........................................................................................................................................494. Emergent Allee Effects through Biomass Overcompensation.........................................................................................................1155. Emergent Facilitation among Predators on Size-Structured Prey...................................................................................................1656. Ontogenetic Niche Shifts........................................................................................................................................1967. Mixed Interactions..............................................................................................................................................2538. Ontogenetic Niche Shifts, Predators, and Coexistence among Consumer Species.....................................................................................2969. Dynamics of Consumer-Resource Systems...........................................................................................................................32910. Dynamics of Consumer-Resource Systems with Discrete Reproduction: Multiple Resources and Confronting Model Predictions with Empirical Data.....................36111. Cannibalism in Size-Structured Systems.........................................................................................................................39112. Demand-Driven Systems, Model Hierarchies, and Ontogenetic Asymmetry............................................................................................425References.........................................................................................................................................................505Index..............................................................................................................................................................525

Chapter One

A Bird's-Eye View of Community and Population Effects of Ontogenetic Development

Why start with summarizing the contents of a book? In the present case we see at least two good reasons. First, the amount of information provided in our book is without doubt quite massive. A summary provides an overview of the many topics that we cover and, we hope, reduces the risk that the reader will get lost in details and can no longer see the forest through the trees. Second, and partly related to the first reason, a number of, in our mind, novel and fundamental insights (some of them were not even known to us when we started to write the book!) are advanced. Here a summary serves the purpose of clearly showing how different chapters fit together in a general framework with respect to model approaches as well as results obtained. Reading this summary chapter will show you the different types of community modules that we analyze (summarized in figure 1.3) and give you a clear impression of the results and insights that we present in this book. Most of all, we hope it will serve as an encouragement to delve in more detail into the chapters that follow.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Ecology has a long tradition of building theory about the dynamics of populations and the structure of communities that emerge from it. The early foundations for this theory were established by the pioneering work of Alfred Lotka and Vito Volterra, who formulated the most simple models for the dynamics of populations engaged in competitive and predator-prey interactions. Lotka-Volterra models have been used widely and form the basis of most, if not all, of our current theory on population and community processes. Because of their simplicity Lotka-Volterra models have often been viewed as leading to predictions that are general and representative for many different systems. And yet, these models completely ignore one of the most important processes in an individual's life history—one that is, moreover, unique to biology: development.

Lotka-Volterra models use population abundance as the state variable to characterize a population and describe changes therein using rather abstract demographic and community parameters such as population growth rates and coefficients of interaction between species. The dynamics of a population is described as the balance between reproduction and mortality, which increase and decrease abundance, respectively. In essence, these two processes are not unique to biological systems, as synthesis of particles from substituent elements and degradation of particles also occurs in, for example, chemical systems. Analogously, increases and decreases in population abundance result from the reproduction and mortality, respectively, of individual organisms. However, no individual organism of any species can reproduce right after it has been born, nor is its chance to die the same throughout all stages of its life history. Individual organisms go through an ontogenetic development, which is a major component of their life history. In fact, given that many individuals die before they manage to reproduce, ontogenetic development can be considered the most prominent life history process after mortality.

The intricacies of an individual's life history, including its ontogenetic development, have forever fascinated ecologists and have been studied extensively. Nonetheless, the absence of ontogenetic development as an important life history process from the core models of ecological theory has not been cause for major concern, nor has it been considered an important omission. The progression through different life stages has been accounted for in matrix models that focus on the potential of population growth of single populations, but when considering interactions between species and models of larger communities, the simplification of the population to a number of individuals without distinguishing between these individuals has been the rule. Basic ecological models thus ignore without much qualm the most prominent process in an individual's life history, one that is unique to biological systems and has no counterpart in physical and chemical systems.

The most important aspect of ontogenetic development in virtually all species is an increase in body size. Body size, in turn, determines to a large extent an individual's ecology in terms of its feeding, growth and reproduction rate, the food sources it can exploit, and the predators to which it is exposed. Moreover, in most species growth in body size is plastic, dependent on the environmental conditions the individual experiences, in particular, the availability of food resources that are required for its maintenance, growth, and reproduction. The consequences of such plastic and food-dependent ontogenetic development for the dynamics of populations and the structure of communities are the subject of this book....