Papers in the Biological Sciences
Date of this Version
9-2014
Citation
The Quarterly Review of Biology Sep 2014, Volume 89, Issue 3, pp. 260 - 261
Abstract
The authors present a derivation, synthesis, and exposition of the consequences of juvenile-adult stage-structured models leading to biomass overcompensation with increasing mortality rates. They compile and elaborate upon their previous work, using the space afforded to provide a thorough explanation and examination of model variants.
They argue the most important stage-structure element to include is, minimally, a model with juveniles and adults. Fundamentally, these elements are linked by maturation of juveniles to adults and the reproduction of adults to produce more juveniles. The major result is that, for the empirically justified set of parameters presented in the book, increasing the death rate of the consumer can lead to an increase in the biomass of the consumer of either the juveniles or the adults, depending on the relative consumption of the juvenile and the adult. A critical condition for this result is having different limiting resources for the two stages. Their models reflect the idea that juveniles and adults often consume different resources or at least have different efficiencies of resource consumption due to their different sizes, if not their different morphologies. Biomass compensation has been previously documented in models, but I doubt it has ever been explored so thoroughly.