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April
16, 2007 Favorable
environmental
conditions that produce abundant supplies of food and stimulate
population
booms appear to set the stage for population crashes that occur when
several
"good years" in a row are followed by a bad year. "It's almost
paradoxical, because you'd think a large population would be better
off, but it
turns out they're more vulnerable to a drop in resources," says Wilmers. Understanding how
environmental
changes influence fluctuations in animal populations is crucial to
predicting
and mitigating the influence of global climate change. In a paper that
appears
in the May issue of The American
Naturalist, Wilmers describes a powerful new mathematical
model that
evaluates how climate and resources interact with populations,
including a
fine-grained analysis of impacts on juveniles, reproducing adults, and
adults. In areas where
climate change
leads to more "good years," with the occasional poor year still
occurring, populations will fluctuate dramatically and be more prone to
extinction as a result, said Wilmers. Highly prolific species will be
particularly vulnerable to such fluctuations because their populations
will
build up most rapidly, noted Wilmers, a vertebrate conservation
ecologist.
Dramatic population fluctuations make species more vulnerable to
extinction due
to disease, inbreeding, and other causes; in addition, each crash
reduces the
genetic diversity of a species, lowering its ability to adapt and
making it
more prone to extinction.
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