Abstract:
Although a large number of methods have been proposed to control the non-linear dynamics of unstable populations, very few have been verified using biological populations. Here, we investigated the effects of two well-studied control methods (Both Limiter Control and Target-Oriented Control) on the dynamics of unstable populations of Drosophila melanogaster. We also perform biologically realistic simulations to ascertain the generalizability of our results. We show that both methods can significantly reduce population fluctuations, decrease extinction probability and increase effective population size simultaneously. This is in contrast with earlier studies on single parameter control methods that are not able to concurrently achieve multiple aspects of stability. We use the distribution of population sizes to derive biologically intuitive explanations for the mechanisms of how these two control methods attain stability. Finally, we show that non-Drosophila specific biologically realistic simulations are able to capture almost all the trends of our data. This shows that our results are likely generalizable over a wide range of taxa. Therefore, the control methods that incorporate both culling and restocking (like BLC and TOC) can simultaneously achieve multiple kinds of stability and therefore are strong candidates for field applications.