Related papers: How are mortality rates affected by population den…
Theoretical ecologists have long sought to understand how the persistence of populations depends on biotic and abiotic factors. Classical work showed that demographic stochasticity causes the mean time to extinction to increase…
We study the effect of correlations in generation times on the dynamics of population growth of microorganisms. We show that any non-zero correlation that is due to cell-size regulation, no matter how small, induces long-term oscillations…
We analyse a series of bacterial growth models with in-built inter-individual variation in rates of cell division. We show that this variation leads to reduced population growth in favorable regimes and reduced population killing in…
Population control policies are proposed and in some places employed as a means towards curbing population growth. This paper is concerned with a disturbing side-effect of such policies, namely, the potential risk of societal fragmentation…
Natural rivers connect to each other to form networks. The geometric structure of a river network can significantly influence spatial dynamics of populations in the system. We consider a process-oriented model to describe population…
Using a stochastic Susceptible-Infected-Removed (SIR) meta-population model of disease transmission, we present analytical calculations and numerical simulations dissecting the interplay between stochasticity and the division of a…
We use a combination of extreme value theory, survival analysis and computer-intensive methods to analyze the mortality of Italian and French semi-supercentenarians for whom there are validated records. After accounting for the effects of…
Over the past century, nonlinear difference and differential equations have been used to understand conditions for species coexistence. However, these models fail to account for random fluctuations due to demographic and environmental…
This research explores how total mortality figures relate to age-standardized death rates within the United States, using the complete historical record of national mortality statistics. Through a detailed investigation of both all-cause…
Neutral dynamics, where taxa are assumed to be demographically equivalent and their abundance is governed solely by the stochasticity of the underlying birth-death process, has proved itself as an important minimal model that accounts for…
Cellular senescence is thought to play a major role in age-related diseases, which cause nearly 67% of all human deaths worldwide. Recent research in mice showed that exercising mice had higher levels of telomerase, an enzyme that helps…
Mortality is different across countries, states and regions. Several empirical research works however reveal that mortality trends exhibit a common pattern and show similar structures across populations. The key element in analyzing…
Suicides cause over 49000 deaths yearly in the United States, 55% involving firearms. Suicide mortality exhibits substantial geographical and sociodemographic heterogeneity; yet the role of social networks remains underexplored. To assess…
Smoking of tobacco is predicted to cause approximately six million deaths worldwide in 2014. Responding effectively to this epidemic requires a thorough understanding of how smoking behaviour is transmitted and modified. Here, we present a…
Most contemporary mortality models rely on extrapolating trends or past events. However, population dynamics will be significantly impacted by climate change, notably the influence of temperatures on mortality. In this paper, we introduce a…
The factors contributing to the persistence and stability of life are fundamental for understanding complex living systems. Organisms are commonly challenged by harsh and fluctuating environments that are suboptimal for growth and…
Standard evolutionary theories of aging and mortality, implicitly based on assumptions of spatial averaging, hold that natural selection cannot favor shorter lifespan without direct compensating benefit to individual reproductive success.…
This paper shows that differentiating the lifetimes of two phenotypes independently from their fertility can lead to a qualitative change in the equilibrium of a population: since survival and reproduction are distinct functional aspects of…
Environmental changes greatly influence the evolution of populations. Here, we study the dynamics of a population of two strains, one growing slightly faster than the other, competing for resources in a time-varying binary environment…
We finely describe the "coming down from infinity" for birth and death processes which eventually become extinct. Our biological motivation is to study the decrease of regulated populations which are initially large. Under general…