Level of life
Population
All the members of one species living in the same area at the same time.
Population dynamics
How population sizes change through births, deaths and interactions such as predation. Mathematical predator-prey models date to the 1920s.Source: Volterra, 1926Source: Krebs et al., 2001
Also called predator-prey, Lotka-Volterra.
Idea or model
How Population dynamics connects
Population dynamics describes
Population dynamics includes
Idea or model
Functional response
How a predator's feeding rate changes with prey density. It often levels off when prey are plentiful.
Population dynamics includes the example
Idea or model
Paradox of enrichment
In some predator-prey models, adding resources makes population cycles larger and less stable instead of simply raising every population.
Studied in
Your progress
Sources & further reading
The explanations on this page are our own summaries of these sources. Follow a link to read the original; if anything here disagrees with it, the original wins. How we choose and check sources.
Fluctuations in the abundance of a species considered mathematically (opens the original in a new tab)
Volterra V (1926). Nature 118:558-560.
One of the founding mathematical models of predator-prey cycles.
Historical paperTheory or modelWhat drives the 10-year cycle of snowshoe hares? (opens the original in a new tab)
Krebs CJ, Boonstra R, Boutin S, et al. (2001). BioScience 51:25-35.
Real population cycles involve food, predators and more; simple two-species models leave much out.
Peer-reviewedReview