Stabilizing biological populations and metapopulations through Adaptive Limiter Control

Abstract

Despite great interest in techniques for stabilizing the dynamics of biological populations and metapopulations, very few practicable methods have been developed or empirically tested. We propose an easily implementable method, Adaptive Limiter Control (ALC), for reducing the magnitude of fluctuation in population sizes and extinction frequencies and demonstrate its efficacy in stabilizing laboratory populations and metapopulations of Drosophila melanogaster. Metapopulation stability was attained through a combination of reduced size fluctuations however, and synchrony at the subpopulation level. Simulations indicated that ALC was effective over a range of maximal population growth rates, migration rates and population dynamics models. Since simulations using broadly applicable, non-species-specific models of population dynamics were able to capture most features of the experimental data, we expect our results to be applicable to a wide range of species.