Playing god with #beetles: "An explanation for unexpected population crashes in a constant environment" by Johnson et al. 2022 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ele.14110
"Most of the time, populations can be described as fluctuating randomly around a weakly-stable equilibrium. However, some populations experience unexpected population crashes... ecological #blackswan events. These crashes, however rare, have outsized consequences for conservation and management"
"we use mechanistic models and flour #beetle microcosm experiments to derive a novel mechanism of population crashes... can occur when stochasticity occasionally ‘pushes’ population density into a regime where overcrowding is severe."
Curiously: "Obviously, only females can oviposit. Less obviously, females are far more voracious egg cannibals than males—using industrial die to perform an egg mark-recapture experiment, Sonleitner (1961) found that #Tribolium castaneum females ate 19 times as many eggs as males."
