Sah+_2013_JTB

Sah, Pratha, Salve, Joseph and Dey, S. Stabilizing biological populations and metapopulations by Adaptive Limiter Control. arXiv 1205.4086. Journal of Theoretical Biology 320 (7), 113-123.

Despite great interest in techniques for stabilizing the dynamics of biological populations and metapopulations, very few practicable methods have been developed. We have proposed an easily implementable method, Adaptive Limiter Control (ALC), for reducing extinction frequencies and the magnitude of fluctuation in population sizes, and demonstrated its efficacy in stabilizing laboratory populations and metapopulations of Drosophila melanogaster. Metapopulation stability was attained through a combination of reduced size fluctuations and synchrony at the subpopulation level. Simulations indicated that ALC was effective over a wide range of maximal population growth rates, migration rates and population dynamics models. Since simulations using widely applicable, non-species-specific models of population dynamics were able to capture most features of the experimental data, we expect our results to be applicable to a wide range of species.

The highlights of this work are:

1. New method for controlling the dynamics of populations and metapopulations: one of the very few in that can be actually implemented in a real biological population / metapopulation.

2. First control method that is empirically shown to work for a biological metapopulation.

3. Only method till date to reduce both fluctuations in population size as well as extinction probability of a metapopulation.

4. Good correspondence between simulation predictions and empirical results.

5. We also show the possible mechanism by which this stability is attained, thus presenting empirical verification for a number of extant theoretical results and corroborating the results of previous studies from different groups.

6. Since our simulations involve non-species-specific models and biologically realistic assumptions like extinction, noise and lattice effect, the results are likely to be widely applicable.

7. Because of 1-6, we believe this work to be of direct interest to ecologists (theoretical and empirical) and non-linear dynamists. The practical implications also make it of potential interest to applied ecologists.