Quantitative Population Ethology
by
Since the advent of theoretical population biology, there have been a
number of attempts to simulate and predict the states of various
biological systems using any number of sophisticated analytical,
statistical, and numerical techniques. In some cases such techniques
have been extremely successful, while in other applications the same
approaches have failed miserably. We shall briefly discuss some of the
general properties of theoretical population biology and then examine
two biological systems as they might be viewed by a field
biologist. From this study we conjecture some of the properties that
an individual in a small population may exhibit. Based on these
properties we suggest a possible modeling technique that is uniquely
dependent on the information that the biologist observes.
Manuscript available as
TR1003.