Search results for "demographic buffering"

Demographic responses of a site-faithful and territorial predator to its fluctuating prey: long-tailed skuas and arctic lemmings.

2014

Summary1. Environmental variability, through interannual variation in food availability or climaticvariables, is usually detrimental to population growth. It can even select for constancy in keylife-history traits, though some exceptions are known. Changes in the level of environmentalvariability are therefore important to predict population growth or life-history evolution.Recently, several cyclic vole and lemming populations have shown large dynamical changesthat might affect the demography or life-histories of rodent predators.2. Skuas constitute an important case study among rodent predators, because of theirstrongly saturating breeding productivity (they lay only two eggs) and high deg…