Time Lag in Population Models
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Excerpt
The early deterministic mathematical models of population growth were necessarily highly simplified. The usual simplifying assumptions were that adjustment to changes in the environment, including those changes brought about by the increasing population itself, took place instantaneously, that all of the terms in the equations were linear, and that the only variables in the equations were the population numbers. Although analytical solutions to the simplified equations have been found, the situations described by the equations are so far from those observed in natural populations that the validity of this whole approach has often been questioned. In many cases the behavior of laboratory populations grown under carefully controlled conditions has been quite different from that predicted by theory.
When the time lags which are physiologically necessary in the response of an animal to changes in the environment are inserted into the population equations, a whole array of solutions appears that was...
