Relating individual behaviour to population dynamics

Relating individual behaviour to population dynamics.

How do the behavioural interactions between individuals in an ecological system produce the global population dynamics of that system? We present a stochastic individual-based model of the reproductive cycle of the mite Varroa jacobsoni, a parasite of honeybees. The model has the interesting property in that its population level behaviour is approximated extremely accurately by the exponential ...

Problems and pitfalls in relating climate variability to population dynamics

We discuss 3 methodological issues involved in climate-population dynamics research. Precise alternative hypotheses are the first requirement, and correlational studies are the weakest way to test the multiple working hypotheses required. Large-scale effects are difficult to investigate because of heterogeneity in environmental variables, and long-term predictions require more patience to test ...

On Determining Individual Behaviour from Population Data

Relating neural dynamics to neural coding.

We demonstrate that two key theoretical objects used widely in computational neuroscience, the phase-resetting curve (PRC) from dynamics and the spike triggered average (STA) from statistical analysis, are closely related when neurons fire in a nearly regular manner and the stimulus is sufficiently small. We prove that the STA due to injected noisy current is proportional to the derivative of t...

How to lift a model for individual behaviour to the population level?

The quick answer to the title question is: by bookkeeping; introduce as p(opulation)-state a measure telling how the individuals are distributed over their common i(ndividual)-state space, and track how the various i-processes change this measure. Unfortunately, this answer leads to a mathematical theory that is technically complicated as well as immature. Alternatively, one may describe a popu...