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| Mathematics Department Colloquium |
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| Start Date: | 1/28/2011 | Start Time: | 4:00 PM |
| End Date: | 1/28/2011 | End Time: | 5:00 PM |
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Event Description
Yang Kuang
School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences
Arizona State University
"What we eat matters: Resource quality dynamics and its implications"
Mathematical biologists have built on variants of the Lotka--Volterra equations and in almost all cases have adopted the pure physical sciences' single-currency (energy) approach to understand population dynamics. However, biomass production requires more than just energy. It is crucially dependent on the chemical compositions of both the consumer species and food resources. In this talk, we explore how depicting organisms as entities of more than one thing (for example, C and a limiting nutrient, such as P) in stoichiometrically explicit models results in qualitatively different and realistic predictions about the growth dynamics. Stoichiometric models incorporate both food quantity and food quality effects in a single framework, appear to stabilize producer-consumer systems while simultaneously producing rich dynamics with alternative domains of attraction and counterintuitive outcomes, such as coexistence of more than one predator species with a single prey and decreased herbivore performance in response to increased plant growth rate. Stoichiometric theory has tremendous potential for both quantitative and qualitative improvements in the predictive power of mathematical models in the study of disease evolution and treatment dynamics. |
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