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Lemming Population Flux Solved: Mass Suicide Not to Blame
quogmire writes "Australia's ABC reports that biologists from the Universities of Finland and Freiburg (Germany) have finally solved the question of lemming population fluctuations once thought to be caused by lemmings mass-suiciding by plunging off cliffs. 'Lemming populations, they say, surge spectacularly and fall just as quickly, thanks to the combined feasting of four predators: the stoat, arctic fox, snowy owl and a seabird called the long-tailed skua.' The original article (Login required) is published in Science."
I suspect that the human population will go through a similar cycle. Exponential growth, exceed the carrying capacity and then population crash. We're seeing it at the local scale but with globalisation, I don't see anything to stop it on a global scale.
At the moment, the western industrialised nations are fairly steady state but the developing and 3rd world nations are definitely not. We can look forward to wars over resources in the relatively near future (have they started already, iraq just the prequel?).
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I guess whoever did this study failed their first ecology course in college.
Almost every ecology teacher beats several key things into your heads.
1. Survival of the fittest
in other words an individual does not do something for the benifit of the species, mainly due to the fact that doing so diverts energy that could be used to producing more young so that their genes survive. The individual will do things to benifit their genes, but not for unrelated individuals of the same species. Social species do have some altruistic behaviours, but their communities are generally made up of individuals that are related. However these altruistic behaviors do not include suicide.
2. The lynx and Hare.
Classic example of what is going on with the lemmings here. As the hare population increases there is more food for the lynx, thus more offspring are produced. As the lynx population increases there are fewer hare to eat and the lynx population declines, and so on.
So this study on lemmings is not surprising, actually I'm quite shocked that someone didn't figure it out sooner.
crowbar??
I guess they thought it was only the end product that mattered.
Back in the day, THE thing to study at university was Chemical Engineering, since graduates were in high demand and earned a fortune.
Guess what ? 3 years later, there was a glut and they couldn't find jobs.
Parallels with today's job market anyone ?
Parallels with lemming population ?
Yes, but the details of the altruism seem to be missed in a lot of popular science writing. Evolution is working on behavior here, and the more complicated a behavior is the harder it is to appear and persist. So, if a simple response of helping a neighbor at only a minor cost usually benefits a relative, the fact that nearby non-relatives sometimes get helped isn't violating some evolutionary principle.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
Even my fathers high-school math books had examples of populations of two animals, one predator, and one herbivore. This is about the simplest differential equation you can get, and has probably been well-known for quite a few centuries. If anyone has felt the need to use chaos theory here, they must clearly have worked with completely different examples.
Furthermore, nobody is surprised that lemming populations are chaotic. The reason is that lemming populations are not chaotic. And we are not surprised about this either, is we've had the chance to observe lemming populations out in the nature for several millennia, and so far, they've been pretty regular in their cycles.
There is one thing I can agree with you about. Yes, there were no news here. Anyone half-way educated about biology would know better than to believe that lemmings do mass-suicide. Unfortunately, I haven't got access to nature and the original article, but I assume the "breakthrough" if any, would be more akin to a more reliable model, or better insight into why some model already works well. Solving differential equations for populations with 3 or 4 species shouldn't exactly be beyond the abilities of most biologists working with population.
conforming to the orthodox methodology rater than carrying out an independent investigation
media vs scientists.
They set out to tell a story, not test a hypothesis.