Ecology

Population Ecology
Population Ecology: Intraspecific Competition Page [1 of 2]
Let’s talk some more about this logistic model of population growth and how it’s a working model for figuring out some
of the specifics about populations. Remember that what we said was that, boy, up here we have this thing called the
carrying capacity and in our logistic growth model what’s going to happen is that the population is going to remain
constant at this level, and this level being when it approaches the carrying capacity. And we talked about different
types of populations and the strategies they might have evolved if they were a group of organisms or a species that
lived at this end of the wild side. In other words, where they were very close to the carrying capacity, and then other
organisms or other populations that may never get up that high in terms of their sheer numbers and have evolved
other strategies. And in a nutshell it comes down to this – in our selected strategy, you're going to have creatures that
reproduce very rapidly, no parental care, high infant mortality rate, get the genes out and go, and so it’s a generally
short life span kind of thing. And those are the ones that don’t live near the carrying capacity of that given
environment. On the other hand, there are others that are going to live at this end and those are going to have
relatively low birth rates. The young that they have they're going to nourish, they're going to carry them on and they're
going to have a very long, slow, relatively speaking, life span, until they reach sexual maturity.

That being said, we have to ask ourselves a question before I put this down. And the question I want to ask is this:
what are some of the factors that are changing this slop here? We’ve talked about – okay, what about some
populations that are there already? What are some factors that can change the rate of growth, the idea that this slope
is constantly changing, but it’s changing now in a less steep, getting less and less steep each time, therefore the rate
of change is decreasing, and therefore it’s not increasing as fast. What are the factors that do that? And therefore we
have to talk about a form of competition called intraspecific competition.

Well, why competition? Let me start right there. Why competition? Well, you know, in a population, we’re talking
about organisms all of the same species, and if they’re all of the same species, they're competing. This is Darwinian
selection. And that’s what drives natural selection or sexual selection, this idea of competition, variety, competition,
and variety. And so therefore, in this intraspecific model of competition, using the logistic growth curve as our basis,
we have to basically establish this; that what’s going to happen is we are going to get resource depletion. And in a
case where there’s going to be resource depletion, there’s going to be literally a decline in the growth rate. So
depletion of resources will mean depletion of growth rate, until you get stable.

What I just described to you is something called density dependent. You see why it’s called density dependent? In
other words, the idea that a high population causes resource lack. It means that the factors that are causing the
change in that growth curve are dependent upon density. The density of what? The density of the population. In
other words, crowding. It gets too darn crowded and you can’t find a good restaurant. And that’s what it’s all about,
you can’t find enough food. You’ll find that species or organisms that are in crowded conditions will individually, at
individual times, you’ll have fewer eggs produced, you’ll have smaller clutches of eggs in crowded conditions, you’ll
have fewer fertilizations, taking seeds and plants. Why? Well, that’s a good question.

Why, for example, might an organism produce fewer young in a given year and more young the following year? Well,
nutrition. Think about that – nutrition. And if there’s enough food to go around, well then their bodies are going to
produce multiple eggs and things are going to be good. You know, there’s even some consideration, and there’s no
solid data on this at this point, but there’s been a lot of studies of the human population and the average age of the
onset of menstruation, which is a very interesting thing. You know, there’s some anecdotal evidence and some
historical evidence that suggests that women are starting to be fertile, or starting their menstrual cycles at earlier ages
th
in the 20 Century, particularly in highly developed countries where there’s a large supply of fatty foods. It seems to
be related to body fat. And, in its relation to body fat, therefore the age of fertility seems to be getting younger in
human beings. And that’s a story still to be told, but it’s worth thinking about. It makes kind of sense, when you think
about crowding, density dependence and deprivation based on not enough resources. Very cool stuff!

So what would a density dependence situation look like? Well, in this particular beetle population, it's very clear what
happened. In this particular experiment, the density of the population in a given area was plotted against the number
of survivors. And it’s very clear that what was starting to happen was that this beetle population was running out of
something, and probably food. And as we, up to here, 60 survivors and, as the population goes further and further
down – excuse me, as the density goes further and further up, the population survivorship goes down. That would be
a good example of a density dependent situation.
Ecology
Population Ecology
Population Ecology: Intraspecific Competition Page [2 of 2]
So one other thing about this whole density dependent thing, it kind of goes in a circle, but the density dependency is
literally determining the carrying capacity. The denser you get, the less carrying capacity a given environment may
have, because you will use up environmental resources. So it’s all related.

Now, I do want to mention one more thing to you. Are there any factors that are population movements that have
nothing to do with population density? I wouldn’t ask that question if there weren’t. We call those density independent
variables. Density independent factors are factors that have nothing to do with how many critters are around or how
many plants are around. For example, the most common factor we use for density independent is weather, climate.
An early frost can literally decimate an insect population, and yet it had nothing to do with how many there were. You
just froze all of them to death.

Here’s a good example of an Australian insect commonly used, called the thrip. Now the thrip is a pest in Australia
and just let me remind you of one thing – December in Australia is the summer, so the graph is correct. And what
happens is the thrips, basically they’re rose thrips. They eat the petals and pollen and they destroy roses, and you
can see what starts to happen here. In the summer, there’s a very high population of them, and yet, you see, we have
this arrow in here, because they’re carrying capacity – I mean, there’s roses everywhere and there is no way, shape
or form that they're infesting all the roses, and that they're overcrowded or anything like that. And yet, you see, that it
plummets, and then in March, and then through June there’s always a population, but it rises again in December.
Well, why is that? Well, the rise in December is easy, you have a lot of roses happening, so they can reproduce and
eat and they’re well nourished. But then what happens is, in March and as they go through the dry months of summer
and the other aspects of the Australian weather, cause the petals to fall off. And so this weather thing is what’s
affecting the thrips. The weather causes the roses to lose their petals. The thrips lose their food source. So it’s not a
question of there are too many thrips, it’s a question of the weather has affected their food source. And so that’s a
density independent example.

And, you know, that brings us to one last topic here, which segues us very nicely into a discussion on interspecific.
And it has to do with a classical study that is now, I don’t want to say it’s been under some doubt, but it’s making us
think twice. And it’s the classical study of the snowshoe hare and the lynx. And this classical study basically said this:
it’s very simple, this is a question of population densities of predator and prey. And you know what? It made so much
sense, but until we started more about this predator-prey stuff – and this is called the predator-prey oscillation. And
what it shows is this: it was graphed and the hare population of 1850 to 1925, and so what would happen is the red
line would represent the hares and the lynx population would rise correspondingly. And this was called the predator-
prey oscillation and it’s very clear that as the hare population rises, the lynx population rises. If the hare population
goes down, the lynx population goes down. Food and resource – predator.

What’s the argument here? The argument is this: guess what happens when we put rabbits by themselves on an
island? The same thing. They go through the same oscillation. So it looks like it’s a combination of things. It looks
like we have some kind of density independent thing happening here with the rabbits, which, in turn, is affecting the
food source of the lynx.

So, once again, it’s never as simple as it seems, but again the logistic model, a good way to look at things for the sake
of comparison.