ECOLOGY:
A Tale of Big Game and Small Bugs
Esa Ranta, Veijo Kaitala, Per Lundberg
Animal populations undergo repetitive cycles of rising and falling numbers. In a Perspective, Ranta and colleagues discuss the value of time-series analyses for examining the changing dynamics of animal populations. A large time series gathered by the Hudson Bay Company based on the fur trade has provided invaluable data on the rise and fall of the Canadian lynx population from 1821 to the present. Analysis of this time series reveals that climate as well as factors influencing birth and death rates are important in regulating the lynx population (Stenseth et al.). In a separate study, mathematical modeling combined with fieldwork revealed the importance of predators in determining the population fluctuations of the southern pine beetle
(Turchin et al.)
E. Ranta is in the Integrative Ecology Unit, Division of Population Biology, Department of Ecology and Systematics, University of Helsinki, Post Office Box 17, Helsinki, FIN-00014, Finland. V. Kaitala is in the Department of Biological and Environmental Science, University of Jyväskylä, Post Office Box 35, FIN-40351 Jyväskylä, Finland. P. Lundberg is in the Department of Theoretical Ecology, Lund University, Ecology Building, SE-223 62 Lund, Sweden.
