Biomedical subjects

P Marrow

Publications and source records attributed to P Marrow.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1996

State-dependent life history evolution in Soay sheep: dynamic modelling of reproductive scheduling.

Adaptive decisions concerning the scheduling of reproduction in an animal's lifetime, including age at maturity and clutch or litter size, should depend on an animal's body condition or state. In this state-dependent case, we are concerned with the optimization of sequences of actions and so dynamic optimization techniques are appropriate. Here we show how stochastic dynamic programming can be used to study the reproductive strategies and population dynamics of natural populations, assuming optimal decisions. As examples we describe models based upon field data from an island population of Soay sheep on St. Kilda. This population shows persistent instability, with cycles culminating in high mortality every three or four years. We explore different assumptions about the extent to which Soay ewes use information about the population cycle in making adaptive decisions. We compare the observed distributions of strategies and population dynamics with model predictions; the results indicate that Soay ewes make optimal reproductive decisions given that they have no information about the population cycle. This study represents the first use of a dynamic optimization life history model of realistic complexity in the study of a field population. The techniques we use are potentially applicable to many other populations, and we discuss their extension to other species and other life history questions.

Acclimatization↗

PubMed1996

Evolutionary dynamics of predator-prey systems: an ecological perspective.

Evolution takes place in an ecological setting that typically involves interactions with other organisms. To describe such evolution, a structure is needed which incorporates the simultaneous evolution of interacting species. Here a formal framework for this purpose is suggested, extending from the microscopic interactions between individuals--the immediate cause of natural selection, through the mesoscopic population dynamics responsible for driving the replacement of one mutant phenotype by another, to the macroscopic process of phenotypic evolution arising from many such substitutions. The process of coevolution that results from this is illustrated in the context of predator-prey systems. With no more than qualitative information about the evolutionary dynamics, some basic properties of predator-prey coevolution become evident. More detailed understanding requires specification of an evolutionary dynamic; two models for this purpose are outlined, one from our own research on a stochastic process of mutation and selection and the other from quantitative genetics. Much of the interest in coevolution has been to characterize the properties of fixed points at which there is no further phenotypic evolution. Stability analysis of the fixed points of evolutionary dynamical systems is reviewed and leads to conclusions about the asymptotic states of evolution rather different from those of game-theoretic methods. These differences become especially important when evolution involves more than one species.

Animals↗

PubMed1995

Evolutionary cycling in predator-prey interactions: population dynamics and the red queen.

This paper describes the coevolution of phenotypes in a community comprising a population of predators and of prey. It is shown that evolutionary cycling is a likely outcome of the process. The dynamical systems on which this description is based are constructed from microscopic stochastic birth and death events, together with a process of random mutation. Births and deaths are caused in part by phenotype-dependent interactions between predator and prey individuals and therefore generate natural selection. Three outcomes of evolution are demonstrated. A community may evolve to a state at which the predator becomes extinct, or to one at which the species coexist with constant phenotypic values, or the species may coexist with cyclic changes in phenotypic values. The last outcome corresponds to a Red Queen dynamic, in which the selection pressures arising from the predator-prey interaction cause the species to evolve without ever reaching an equilibrium phenotypic state. The Red Queen dynamic requires an intermediate harvesting efficiency of the prey by the predator and sufficiently high evolutionary rate constant of the prey, and is robust when the model is made stochastic and phenotypically polymorphic. A cyclic outcome lies outside the contemporary focus on evolutionary equilibria, and argues for an extension to a dynamical framework for describing the asymptotic states of evolution.

Animals↗