Two Decades of Drosophila Population Dynamics: Modeling, Experiments, and Implications

Abstract

Fruitflies of the genus Drosophila have been used extensively as model systems in genetics, development, and population ecology for almost a century. A detailed understanding of the ecology of Drosophila cultures, and the major factors playing a role in regulating population size in a density-dependent manner, together with detailed species-specific modeling of population growth, has led to substantial enhancement of our understanding in many areas at the interface of population ecology and evolution over the past two decades in our laboratories. Here, we provide a “big-picture” overview of this body of work on the importance of interactions between local dynamics and dispersal, the context-specific nature of the relationship between the constancy and persistence aspects of population stability, the evaluation of various control strategies for stabilizing population dynamics, and density-dependent selection and the evolution of competitive ability and population stability. We also briefly describe how these studies came about, and how they are interlinked, so that the historical and technical reasons for why these advances were possible with the Drosophila system become clear. We have aimed at giving the reader a proper contextualized introduction that can serve as a background and roadmap to the relevant technical literature, without getting bogged down in details.