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Robert M May

Publications and source records attributed to Robert M May.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Fishing elevates variability in the abundance of exploited species.

The separation of the effects of environmental variability from the impacts of fishing has been elusive, but is essential for sound fisheries management. We distinguish environmental effects from fishing effects by comparing the temporal variability of exploited versus unexploited fish stocks living in the same environments. Using the unique suite of 50-year-long larval fish surveys from the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations we analyse fishing as a treatment effect in a long-term ecological experiment. Here we present evidence from the marine environment that exploited species exhibit higher temporal variability in abundance than unexploited species. This remains true after accounting for life-history effects, abundance, ecological traits and phylogeny. The increased variability of exploited populations is probably caused by fishery-induced truncation of the age structure, which reduces the capacity of populations to buffer environmental events. Therefore, to avoid collapse, fisheries must be managed not only to sustain the total viable biomass but also to prevent the significant truncation of age structure. The double jeopardy of fishing to potentially deplete stock sizes and, more immediately, to amplify the peaks and valleys of population variability, calls for a precautionary management approach.

Animals↗
PubMed2006

Observations on related ecological exponents.

We observe a relationship among three independently derived power laws in ecology: (i) total number of species versus area, (ii) species frequency versus species length, and (iii) maximal body size versus area. Aside from showing how these historically disparate phenomena are connected, we show how recent empirical results relating the maximal body size of top terrestrial vertebrates to the square root of land area conform to a prior theoretical expectation given by two of the above power laws. Of particular interest is the observation that the exponent relating species length to species frequency suggests a dimension for niche space for terrestrial vertebrate assemblages of D approximately 3/2. This value, along with power law for maximal body size, versus area, gives rise to the canonical species area exponent z approximately 1/4.

Animals↗
PubMed2006

Network structure and the biology of populations.

A scientific growth area in recent years has been the study of networks of interacting entities within a population, including species in food webs, human or other animals transmitting infection, proteins in cells, cells in organisms (e.g. neuronal networks), the internet and the World Wide Web. Here, I review some of the differing network patterns that arise in theory and in practice, with an emphasis on their dynamical implications, particularly for resistance to deliberate or accidental disturbance. I offer caveats and opinionated comment about some excesses of enthusiasm and suggest some areas where these network ideas might find further application.

Animals↗
PubMed2005

The evolution of network topology by selective removal.

The topology of large social, technical and biological networks such as the World Wide Web or protein interaction networks has caught considerable attention in the past few years (reviewed in Newman 2003), and analysis of the structure of such networks revealed that many of them can be classified as broad-tailed, scale-free-like networks, since their vertex connectivities follow approximately a power-law. Preferential attachment of new vertices to highly connected vertices is commonly seen as the main mechanism that can generate scale-free connectivity in growing networks (Watts 2004). Here, we propose a new model that can generate broad-tailed networks even in the absence of network growth, by not only adding vertices, but also selectively eliminating vertices with a probability that is inversely related to the sum of their first- and second order connectivity.

Animals↗
PubMed2005

Subnets of scale-free networks are not scale-free: sampling properties of networks.

Most studies of networks have only looked at small subsets of the true network. Here, we discuss the sampling properties of a network's degree distribution under the most parsimonious sampling scheme. Only if the degree distributions of the network and randomly sampled subnets belong to the same family of probability distributions is it possible to extrapolate from subnet data to properties of the global network. We show that this condition is indeed satisfied for some important classes of networks, notably classical random graphs and exponential random graphs. For scale-free degree distributions, however, this is not the case. Thus, inferences about the scale-free nature of a network may have to be treated with some caution. The work presented here has important implications for the analysis of molecular networks as well as for graph theory and the theory of networks in general.

Journal Article↗
PubMed2004

Uses and abuses of mathematics in biology.

In the physical sciences, mathematical theory and experimental investigation have always marched together. Mathematics has been less intrusive in the life sciences, possibly because they have until recently been largely descriptive, lacking the invariance principles and fundamental natural constants of physics. Increasingly in recent decades, however, mathematics has become pervasive in biology, taking many different forms: statistics in experimental design; pattern seeking in bioinformatics; models in evolution, ecology, and epidemiology; and much else. I offer an opinionated overview of such uses--and abuses.

Allergy and Immunology↗
PubMed2003

Somatic selection for and against cancer.

In multicellular organisms, cells cooperate within a well-defined developmental program. Cancer is a breakdown of such cooperation: cells mutate to phenotypes of uncoordinated proliferation. We study basic principles of the architecture of solid tissues that influence the rate of cancer initiation. In particular, we explore how somatic selection acts to prevent or to promote cancer. Cells with mutations in oncogenes or tumor suppressor genes often have increased proliferation rates. Somatic selection increases their abundance and thus enhances the risk of cancer. Many potentially harmful mutations, however, increase the probability of triggering apoptosis and, hence, initially lead to cells with reduced net proliferation rates. Such cells are eliminated by somatic selection, which therefore also works to reduce the risk of cancer. We show that a tissue organization into small compartments avoids the rapid spread of mutations in oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes, but promotes genetic instability. In small compartments, genetic instability, which confers a selective disadvantage for the cell, can spread by random drift. If both deleterious and advantageous mutations participate in tumor initiation, then we find an intermediate optimum for the compartment size.

Animals↗
PubMed2003

Predicted correspondence between species abundances and dendrograms of niche similarities.

We examine a hypothesized relationship between two descriptions of community structure: the niche-overlap dendrogram that describes the ecological similarities of species and the pattern of relative abundances. Specifically, we examine the way in which this relationship follows from the niche hierarchy model, whose fundamental assumption is a direct connection between abundances and underlying hierarchical community organization. We test three important, although correlated, predictions of the niche hierarchy model and show that they are upheld in a set of 11 communities (encompassing fishes, amphibians, lizards, and birds) where both abundances and dendrograms were reported. First, species that are highly nested in the dendrogram are on average less abundant than species from branches less subdivided. Second, and more significantly, more equitable community abundances are associated with more evenly branched dendrogram structures, whereas less equitable abundances are associated with less even dendrograms. This relationship shows that abundance patterns can give insight into less visible aspects of community organization. Third, one can recover the distribution of proportional abundances seen in assemblages containing two species by treating each branch point in the dendrogram as a two-species case. This reconstruction cannot be achieved if abundances and the dendrogram are unrelated and suggests a method for hierarchically decomposing systems. To our knowledge, this is the first test of a species abundance model based on nontrivial predictions as to the origins and causes of abundance patterns, and not simply on the goodness-of-fit of distributions.

Ecology↗