Demographic and life-history responses of predators to small rodent dynamics
Specialist predators feeding on fluctuating rodents display some specific adaptations to rodent cycles; some - such as snowy owls or arctic foxes - are nomadic specialists and move around lots each year to find lemming hotspots;
Publications
Barraquand F. & Yoccoz N.G. 2013. When can environmental variability benefit population growth? Counterintuitive effects of nonlinearities in vital rates. Theoretical Population Biology, 89:1-11. Post on mathoverflow about sums of log-concave functions. Still waiting for a general answer (if you're a mathematician reading this page...)
Barraquand F., Høye T.T., Henden J.-A., Yoccoz N.G., Gilg O., Schmidt N.M., Sittler B. & Ims R.A. 2014. Demographic responses of a site-faithful and territorial predator to its fluctuating prey: Long-tailed skuas and arctic lemmings. Journal of Animal Ecology. 83: 375–387. Data and computer files at Dryad.
others such as long-tailed skuas stick to the same spot and average out the temporal prey variability over their long lifespan. Of course, the adaptiveness of such behaviours and life-histories depend on the rodent dynamics (cyclic or not); and this is complicated by the fact these are often not stationary. Topics of interests are:(1) How do long-tailed skuas respond to lemming lows and changes in lemming dynamics? [joint work with T. Høye, J.A. Henden, R.A. Ims, N.G. Yoccoz, O. Gilg, B. Sittler, N.M. Schmidt](2) Is the effect of food variability on predator populations often negative or positive? [with N.G. Yoccoz](3) Predator evolutionarily stable breeding decisions when rodent dynamics are chaotic/nonstationaryPicture: Long-tailed skua in flight.
