Growth, Reproduction and Population Dynamics

The relationship between individual resource use and fitness is fundamental to an understanding of population dynamics.It has been demonstrated that,in theory,reproductive thresholds have destabilizing effects on population dynamics.We review the published size-fecundity schedules and demonstrate a fundamental difference between plants and animal.Most animal schedules have large,significant thresholds for reproduction,but few plant species exhibit size-fecundity relationships that have negative intercepts.This leads to the prediction that plant populations will generally have stable dynamics whereas animal populations will display the full repertoire of dynamical behaviour