Death in Moderation is Good for Animal Population

It may sound a bit backwards, but researchers found that a moderate amount of death in an animal population may actually help boost overall populations, helping experts better understand how to manage threatened fish and wildlife stocks.

A study recently published in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution details how most animal populations actually benefit in some way from the loss of an individual. However, this benefit heavily depends on the size and developmental stage of the creatures that die.

So what exactly does that mean? Imagine an island full of monsters who are excellent parents. If tragedy strikes, and many juvenile monsters suddenly perish, the adults are suddenly freed up to make more children, potentially boosting population numbers. However, if more adults suddenly die off, more resources can be allocated to the children, helping a great deal more of them to mature into upstanding adult monsters.

"It doesn't matter which developmental stage you target, if you impose mortality on one you will get overcompensation on the opposite end of the size range," study co-author Anieke van Leeuwen explained in a statement. "This effect can be especially advantageous in situations where we want to manage resources we want to harvest. Knowing that there are potential effects that result in an increase in that segment of the population we want to encourage is highly relevant."

Of course, there are still points in time in any living population when the species declines as a whole. This occurs during mass death events, where mortality becomes too high and rapid for the balancing act van Leeuwen mentions to correct it.

However, these kinds of events are rare, only occurring when conditions change so suddenly and drastically that they can also be tired to extinction events.

Nature World News recently reported on a study that specifically observed this population phenomenon in nature, where overall recovering wolf populations seemed unfazed by the death of individual adults, despite the fact that these animals were the "breeders" for a pack.