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Most organisms show substantial changes in size or morphology after they become independent of their parents and have to find their own food. Furthermore, the rate at which these changes occur generally depends on the amount of food they ingest. In this book, André de Roos and Lennart Persson advance a synthetic and individual-based theory of the effects of this plastic ontogenetic development on the dynamics of populations and communities.


De Roos and Persson show how the effects of ontogenetic development on ecological dynamics critically depend on the efficiency with which differently sized individuals convert food into new biomass. Differences in this efficiency--or ontogenetic asymmetry--lead to bottlenecks in and thus population regulation by either maturation or reproduction. De Roos and Persson investigate the community consequences of these bottlenecks for trophic configurations that vary in the number and type of interacting species and in the degree of ontogenetic niche shifts exhibited by their individuals. They also demonstrate how insights into the effects of maturation and reproduction limitation on community equilibrium carry over to the dynamics of size-structured populations and give rise to different types of cohort-driven cycles.


Featuring numerous examples and tests of modeling predictions, this book provides a pioneering and extensive theoretical and empirical treatment of the ecology of ontogenetic growth and development in organisms, emphasizing the importance of an individual-based perspective for understanding population and community dynamics.

Table of Contents

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  1. Cover
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  1. Title Page, Copyright
  2. pp. i-iv
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  1. Contents
  2. pp. v-viii
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  1. Preface
  2. pp. ix-xii
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  1. PART I: SUMMARY AND INTRODUCTION
  1. 1. Summary: A Bird’s-Eye View of Community and Population Effects of Ontogenetic Development
  2. pp. 3-23
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  1. 2. Life History Processes, Ontogenetic Development, and Density Dependence
  2. pp. 24-46
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  1. PART II: ONTOGENETIC DEVELOPMENT AND COMMUNITY STRUCTURE
  1. 3. Biomass Overcompensation
  2. pp. 49-114
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  1. 4. Emergent Allee Effects through Biomass Overcompensation
  2. pp. 115-164
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  1. 5. Emergent Facilitation among Predators on Size-Structured Prey
  2. pp. 165-195
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  1. 6. Ontogenetic Niche Shifts
  2. pp. 196-252
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  1. 7. Mixed Interactions
  2. pp. 253-295
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  1. 8. Ontogenetic Niche Shifts, Predators, and Coexistence among Consumer Species
  2. pp. 296-326
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  1. PART III: ONTOGENETIC DEVELOPMENT AND COMMUNITY DYNAMICS
  1. 9. Dynamics of Consumer-Resource Systems
  2. pp. 329-360
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  1. 10. Dynamics of Consumer-Resource Systems with Discrete Reproduction: Multiple Resources and Confronting Model Predictions with Empirical Data
  2. pp. 361-390
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  1. 11. Cannibalism in Size-Structured Systems
  2. pp. 391-422
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  1. PART IV: EXTENSIONS AND PERSPECTIVES
  1. 12. Demand-Driven Systems, Model Hierarchies, and Ontogenetic Asymmetry
  2. pp. 425-450
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  1. Technical Appendices
  2. pp. 451-504
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  1. References
  2. pp. 505-524
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  1. Index
  2. pp. 525-539
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