Revisiting the Role of Individual Variability in Population Persistence and Stability
Populations often exhibit a pronounced degree of individual variability and this can be important when constructing ecological models. In this paper, we revisit the role of inter-individual variability in population persistence and stability under predation pressure. As a case study, we consider int...
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ftpubmed:oai:pubmedcentral.nih.gov:3732237 2023-05-15T15:48:01+02:00 Revisiting the Role of Individual Variability in Population Persistence and Stability Morozov, Andrew Pasternak, Anna F. Arashkevich, Elena G. 2013-08-02 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3732237 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23936450 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0070576 en eng Public Library of Science http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3732237 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23936450 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0070576 This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. CC-BY Research Article Text 2013 ftpubmed https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0070576 2013-09-05T03:23:45Z Populations often exhibit a pronounced degree of individual variability and this can be important when constructing ecological models. In this paper, we revisit the role of inter-individual variability in population persistence and stability under predation pressure. As a case study, we consider interactions between a structured population of zooplankton grazers and their predators. Unlike previous structured population models, which only consider variability of individuals according to the age or body size, we focus on physiological and behavioural structuring. We first experimentally demonstrate a high degree of variation of individual consumption rates in three dominant species of herbivorous copepods (Calanus finmarchicus, Calanus glacialis, Calanus euxinus) and show that this disparity implies a pronounced variation in the consumption capacities of individuals. Then we construct a parsimonious predator-prey model which takes into account the intra-population variability of prey individuals according to behavioural traits: effectively, each organism has a ‘personality’ of its own. Our modelling results show that structuring of prey according to their growth rate and vulnerability to predation can dampen predator-prey cycles and enhance persistence of a species, even if the resource stock for prey is unlimited. The main mechanism of efficient top-down regulation is shown to work by letting the prey population become dominated by less vulnerable individuals when predator densities are high, while the trait distribution recovers when the predator densities are low. Text Calanus finmarchicus Calanus glacialis Copepods PubMed Central (PMC) PLoS ONE 8 8 e70576 |
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Research Article Morozov, Andrew Pasternak, Anna F. Arashkevich, Elena G. Revisiting the Role of Individual Variability in Population Persistence and Stability |
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Research Article |
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Populations often exhibit a pronounced degree of individual variability and this can be important when constructing ecological models. In this paper, we revisit the role of inter-individual variability in population persistence and stability under predation pressure. As a case study, we consider interactions between a structured population of zooplankton grazers and their predators. Unlike previous structured population models, which only consider variability of individuals according to the age or body size, we focus on physiological and behavioural structuring. We first experimentally demonstrate a high degree of variation of individual consumption rates in three dominant species of herbivorous copepods (Calanus finmarchicus, Calanus glacialis, Calanus euxinus) and show that this disparity implies a pronounced variation in the consumption capacities of individuals. Then we construct a parsimonious predator-prey model which takes into account the intra-population variability of prey individuals according to behavioural traits: effectively, each organism has a ‘personality’ of its own. Our modelling results show that structuring of prey according to their growth rate and vulnerability to predation can dampen predator-prey cycles and enhance persistence of a species, even if the resource stock for prey is unlimited. The main mechanism of efficient top-down regulation is shown to work by letting the prey population become dominated by less vulnerable individuals when predator densities are high, while the trait distribution recovers when the predator densities are low. |
format |
Text |
author |
Morozov, Andrew Pasternak, Anna F. Arashkevich, Elena G. |
author_facet |
Morozov, Andrew Pasternak, Anna F. Arashkevich, Elena G. |
author_sort |
Morozov, Andrew |
title |
Revisiting the Role of Individual Variability in Population Persistence and Stability |
title_short |
Revisiting the Role of Individual Variability in Population Persistence and Stability |
title_full |
Revisiting the Role of Individual Variability in Population Persistence and Stability |
title_fullStr |
Revisiting the Role of Individual Variability in Population Persistence and Stability |
title_full_unstemmed |
Revisiting the Role of Individual Variability in Population Persistence and Stability |
title_sort |
revisiting the role of individual variability in population persistence and stability |
publisher |
Public Library of Science |
publishDate |
2013 |
url |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3732237 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23936450 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0070576 |
genre |
Calanus finmarchicus Calanus glacialis Copepods |
genre_facet |
Calanus finmarchicus Calanus glacialis Copepods |
op_relation |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3732237 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23936450 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0070576 |
op_rights |
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
op_rightsnorm |
CC-BY |
op_doi |
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0070576 |
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PLoS ONE |
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8 |
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8 |
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e70576 |
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