What do we know about kangaroos?
What about roaches?
Biotic potential is the maximum number of offspring a species could have if conditions were perfect.
When you plot biotic potential on a graph, it would look like the letter J and is known as exponential growth (Figure 7.1).
Figure 7.2 demonstrates the three survivorship curves.
Humans are the example most often used for Type I.
Songbirds are an example of a Type II. In other words, the death rate for this species is constant during their entire lifetime.
The final type, Type III, can be characterized by frogs. Very few frogs make it to adulthood.
Carrying capacity is the number of organisms an ecosystem can support over time. This is often shown in a graph depicted in Figure 7.3.
The population could crash completely if the ecosystem can’t recover.
But usually, there will be small die-off and then the population will hover around the carrying capacity.
Populations are limited by the amount of resources available.
The size of the population (in either total numbers or percentage) is along the x-axis.
Rapid growth countries:
Slow growth countries:
Zero/stable growth countries:
Declining/negative-growth countries:
Human populations can be growing or declining. There are many factors that can impact this, including:
Thomas Malthus wrote an essay in 1798 in which he stated that humans were growing exponentially, but that food on our planet grew in a linear fashion.
Density-dependent factors are things that affect a population as its density increases.
Density-independent factors are things such as severe storms, droughts, heat waves, and fires that can influence populations regardless of their density.
Finally, you will almost certainly be asked to solve a problem using the rule of 70. This is simply done. The formula is:
Do not change the number given to a decimal; use the percent as a whole number in the calculation.
So, if you are told the annual percentage growth rate is 4 percent, then you just take 70 and divide it by 4, so it will take 17.5 years to double.
The demographic transition model is another way to look at populations (Figure 7.5).
Similar to age-structure diagrams, these are broken up into four stages: preindustrial, transitional, industrial, and postindustrial.
The model demonstrates how countries change as they develop economically. Let’s break down each.
Preindustrial countries have high birth rates and high death rates so the country has a low growth rate.
Transitional countries are the ones you will most likely be asked about on the exam because these are countries where birth rates stay high but death rates begin to drop due to increases in health, food availability, and medicine.
Industrial countries have birth rates that begin to drop due to access to reliable birth control, family planning, women getting educations and jobs and are similar to most developing countries today.
Population momentum is the idea that even though birth rates have fallen, since there are already so many people in reproductive ages, it takes many decades for the population to finally stabilize.
In postindustrial countries economies are strong, citizens are highly educated, medical care is advanced, and women have access to many employment opportunities.
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