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Population Growth

Population Growth

Population size is dynamic, increasing with birth rates and immigration, and decreasing with death rates and emigration. In ideal conditions with unlimited resources, populations can increase exponentially, which plots as a J-shaped growth rate curve of population size against time. This type of curve is characteristic of newly-introduced invasive species, or populations that have suffered catastrophic declines and are rebounding.

What are Populations and Communities?

What are Populations and Communities?

Competition

Competition

When organisms require the same limited resources within an environment, they may have to compete for them. Competition is a net-negative interaction. Even if two competing individuals or populations do not interact directly, the overall fitness of both competitors is lowered as a result of not having full access to the limited resource.

Conservation of Declining Populations

Conservation of Declining Populations

Conservation of declining population focuses on ways of detecting, diagnosing, and halting a population decline. The approach uses methods to prevent populations from going extinct.

Mutation, Gene Flow, and Genetic Drift

Mutation, Gene Flow, and Genetic Drift

In a population that is not at Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, the frequency of alleles changes over time. Therefore, any deviations from the five conditions of Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium can alter the genetic variation of a given population. Conditions that change the genetic variability of a population include mutations, natural selection, non-random mating, gene flow, and genetic drift (small population size).

Genetic Drift

Genetic Drift

Natural selection—probably the most well-known evolutionary mechanism—increases the prevalence of traits that enhance survival and reproduction. However, evolution does not merely propagate favorable traits, nor does it always benefit populations.

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Nov 8, 2025

Following the Dynamics of Structural Variants in Experimentally Evolved Populations

Following the Dynamics of Structural Variants in Experimentally Evolved Populations

Published on: February 3, 2023

Boom-bust population dynamics increase diversity in evolving competitive communities.

Michael Doebeli¹, Eduardo Cancino Jaque², Yaroslav Ispolatov²

¹Department of Zoology and Department of Mathematics, University of British Columbia, 6270 University Boulevard, Vancouver, BC, Canada. doebeli@zoology.ubc.ca.

Communications Biology

|April 24, 2021

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Boom-bust population dynamics, characterized by growth and crashes, can promote greater biological diversity than stable systems. This eco-evolutionary model shows how desynchronized cycles maintain high species diversity.

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Area of Science:

Ecology and evolutionary biology
Theoretical ecology
Biodiversity research

Background:

The competitive exclusion principle limits species coexistence based on resource availability and similarity.
Natural systems, like marine microbial life, exhibit higher diversity than predicted by stable equilibrium models.
Population fluctuations are known to potentially violate the competitive exclusion principle.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how specific population dynamics influence the evolution and maintenance of biological diversity.
To demonstrate that boom-bust dynamics can lead to significantly higher diversity than stable dynamics.

Main Methods:

Utilized simple eco-evolutionary models.
Incorporated boom-bust population dynamics into evolutionary models.
Allowed for adaptive diversification in continuous phenotype spaces.

Main Results:

Boom-bust dynamics were shown to permit the evolution of greater diversity than stable equilibrium dynamics.
Desynchronization of boom-bust cycles among coexisting species was identified as a key mechanism for maintaining high diversity.
The models demonstrated how ecological dynamics can drive evolutionary diversification.

Conclusions:

Boom-bust population dynamics provide a viable mechanism for generating and sustaining high levels of biological diversity.
Eco-evolutionary models incorporating fluctuating population dynamics offer crucial insights into biodiversity origins.
Understanding population cycles is essential for explaining the persistence of diverse ecosystems.