Daily Newsletter April 10, 2012

Daily Newsletter                                                        April 10, 2012

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Today's Topic:  Population Ecology

Readings: While you are encouraged to read chapter 55 of your textbook, the follow readings can be used to answer the daily challenge.

• Population Ecology
• This is a topics page of Scitable by Nature.  The following three articles are specific subjects found on this topics page.  While it provides a basic definition of population ecology, the power of this page is in the links.
• If you are interested about population ecology, explore the links.
• Each of the linked articles is rather short.
• Game Theory, Evolutionary Stable Strategies and the Evolution of Biological Interactions
• The idea of game theory is a critical intellectual model.  This article holds only the basic concept of game theory, but you will see how important it is when you start looking at populations and natural selection.
• Population Limiting Factors
• There is no such thing as unlimited growth.  All growth has limits.  This article talks about some of the most important limiting factors affecting populations.
• How Populations Grow: The Exponential and Logistic Equations
• This article looks at the math behind population growth.  It first looks at single cells, and then moves to how this can be used with larger animals.
• Survivorship Curves
• This short article looks at one of the critical aspects of population ecology, the survivorship curve.  This is a tool to look at the general life expectancy of members of a population, but as you will see, it can provide much more information.

Population ecology deals with research involving individuals, and the interaction of individuals, of the same species that live within the same time and space (as described by the researcher).  So we are looking at birth rates, death rates, survivorship, intraspecies competition, and other aspects of how individuals of a given species live.  Occassionally we will look at two species, such as predator-prey models, or specific examples of competition between two species (game theory).  Research involving more than this is usually handled under the rubric of Community Ecology.

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Daily Challenge
Your challenge today is to describe population ecology in your own words. This is a broad field, so your not expected to talk about every aspect of the field. Give a general account, in your own words, about population ecology; then talk about some aspect that you find interesting.