Eight decades of adaptive changes in herring reproductive investment: the joint effect of environment and exploitation
Abstract Reproductive investment is a central trait for population dynamics and productivity. Fishing and environmental variations are major drivers affecting population structure, dynamics, and adaptation of life-history and behavioural traits. However, those factors are often considered independently, and few studies take into account their joint effect. In this study, we investigate the contribution of environment, fishing pressure, and intra-specific competition to variation in the reproductive investment of the Norwegian spring-spawning herring (Clupea harengus), a stock that has been fished for centuries, and monitored for decades. Reproductive investment and post-spawning weight were…
Non-unique population dynamics: basic patterns
We review the basic patterns of complex non-uniqueness in simple discrete-time population dynamics models. We begin by studying a population dynamics model of a single species with a two-stage, two-habitat life cycle. We then explore in greater detail two ecological models describing host‐macroparasite and host‐parasitoid interspecific interactions. In general, several types of attractors, e.g. point equilibria vs. chaotic, periodic vs. quasiperiodic and quasiperiodic vs. chaotic attractors, may coexist in the same mapping. This non-uniqueness also indicates that the bifurcation diagrams, or the routes to chaos, depend on initial conditions and are therefore non-unique. The basins of attrac…
Dynamic complexities in host-parasitoid interaction
In the 1970s ecological research detected chaos and other forms of complex dynamics in simple population dynamics models, initiating a new research tradition in ecology. However, the investigations of complex population dynamics have mainly concentrated on single populations and not on higher dimensional ecological systems. Here we report a detailed study of the complicated dynamics occurring in a basic discrete-time model of host-parasitoid interaction. The complexities include (a) non-unique dynamics, meaning that several attractors coexist, (b) basins of attraction (defined as the set of the initial conditions leading to a certain type of an attractor) with fractal properties (pattern of…
Extinction risk under coloured environmental noise
Positively autocorrelated red environmental noise is characterized by a strong dependence of expected sample variance on sample length. This dependence has to be taken into account when assessing extinction risk under red and white uncorrelated environmental noise. To facilitate a comparison between red and white noise, their expected variances can be scaled to be equal, but only at a chosen time scale. We show with a simple one-dimensional population dynamics model that the different but equally reasonable choices of the time scale yield qualitatively different results on the dependence of extinction risk on the colour of environmental noise: extinction risk might increase as well as decre…
The enigma of frequency-dependent selection
Frequency-dependent selection is so fundamental to modern evolutionary thinking that everyone interested in evolutionary biology 'knows' the concept. It is even so fundamental that many authors of textbooks do not bother to define it. Yet it turns out that different authors (and sometimes even one and the same author) use the term to refer to different types of selection. In this paper we try to uncover the sources of this confusion. The concept is fairly well defined in the original concept of population genetical theory, which focuses on short-term evolutionary change, and basically ignores density-dependence. The problems start when the original concept is used in the context of long-ter…
Reply from m. Heino, j.a.j. Metz and v. Kaitala.
Eva Kisdi clarifies the relationships between frequency dependence, optimization and ESSs. We basically agree with all her comments. However, some further clarification may be useful.In the first paragraph of Kisdi's letter, ESSs and optimal strategies are seemingly opposed by saying that `finding an optimal strategy is a considerably stronger result than finding an ESS'. Although this statement is factually correct, it might engender a suggestion that is slightly wrong. Conceptually, ESSs are always primary: only ESSs matter from the viewpoint of long-term evolution. Optimization is secondary only, and must be justified by an ESS argument that explicitly accounts for the ecology in which t…