Published in The American naturalist
In population biology, elasticity is a measure of the importance of a demographic rate on population growth. A relatively small amount of stochasticity can substantially impact the dynamics of a population whose growth is a function of deterministic and stochastic processes. Analyses of natural populations frequently neglect the latter. Even in a p...
Published in The American naturalist
We investigate the coevolution between philopatry and altruism in island-model populations when kin recognition occurs through phenotype matching. In saturated environments, a good discrimination ability is a necessary prerequisite for the emergence of sociality. Discrimination decreases not only with the average phenotypic similarity between immig...
Published in The American naturalist
The role of ecological constraints in promoting sociality is currently much debated. Using a direct-fitness approach, we show this role to depend on the kin-discrimination mechanisms underlying social interactions. Altruism cannot evolve under spatially based discrimination, unless ecological constraints prevent complete dispersal. Increasing const...
Published in The American Naturalist
Published in The American Naturalist
In 1982, Grossman et al. purported to demonstrate that a stream fish assemblage was probably affected more by unpredictable environmental disturbances than by interactive processes such as competition. The main purpose of that paper was to interest ecologists in the possibility that stream fish and invertebrate assemblages may be organized through ...
Published in The American Naturalist
In general, ecological assemblages and communities appear to be regulated primarily by either deterministic or stochastic processes. It is currently important to quantify the relative frequencies of these two types of assemblages since most ecological theory is applicable only to deterministic systems. We attempted to distinguish the mechanism regu...
Published in The American Naturalist
