In food and (or) space-limited populations, increases in average body size may be accompanied by increases in per capita space and (or) energy requirements. Thus, as body size increases in time or space, the equilibrium number of individuals that can be supported in a given environment should decrease. This relationship, referred to as self-thinning, produces a negative linear relationship betw...

1. Much of the debate surrounding the consequences of biodiversity loss centres around the issue of whether different species are functionally similar in their effects on ecological processes. In this study, we examined whether populations consisting of smaller, more abundant individuals are functionally similar to populations of the same species with larger, fewer individuals. 2. We manipulate...

A fast-timescale approximation is applied to the coalescent process in a single population, which is demographically structured by sex and/or age. This provides a general expression for the probability that a pair of alleles sampled from the population coalesce in the previous time interval. The effective population size is defined as the reciprocal of twice the product of generation time and t...

This article reviews the role of migration in determining population size in Australia, and suggest ways of achieving a stationary population, or zero population growth (ZPG), when fertility is below replacement. There is a narrow range of feasible options. It is argued that achievement of ZPG is feasible only with net migration of 60,000-100,000 annually and with a fertility rate of 1.65-1.8...

The ability of the site-frequency spectrum (SFS) to reflect the particularities of gene genealogies exhibiting multiple mergers of ancestral lines as opposed to those obtained in the presence of population growth is our focus. An excess of singletons is a well-known characteristic of both population growth and multiple mergers. Other aspects of the SFS, in particular, the weight of the right ta...

For i = 1, ... ,p, let Xi!, ... ,Xini denote independent random samples from normal populations. The ith population has unknown mean Jli and unknown variance a;. We consider the sign testing problem of testing Ho : Jli :::; ai, for some i = 1, ... ,p, versus HI : Jli > ai, for all i = 1, ... ,p, where al,." ,ap are fixed constants. Here, HI might represent p different standards that a product m...

Large herbivore consumption of forage is known to affect vegetation composition and thereby ecosystem functions. It is thus important to understand how diet composition arises as a mixture of individual variation in preferences and environmental drivers of availability, but few studies have quantified both. Based on 10 years of data on diet composition by aid of microhistological analysis for s...

Somatic growth patterns represent a major component of organismal fitness and may vary among sexes and populations due to genetic and environmental processes leading to profound differences in life-history and demography. This study considered the ontogenic, sex-specific and spatial dynamics of somatic growth patterns in ten populations of the world's largest lizard the Komodo dragon (Varanus k...

The interplay between parasites and their hosts is found in all kinds of species and plays an important role in understanding the principles of evolution and coevolution. Usually, the different genotypes of hosts and parasites oscillate in their abundances. The well-established theory of oscillatory Red Queen dynamics proposes an ongoing change in frequencies of the different types within each ...