• Johnson Derek M
• Liebhold Andrew M
• Tobin Patrick C
• Bjørnstad Ottar N

Nature

• Publish Date: Nov 2006
• ISSN: 1476-4687
• Volume: 444
• Issue: 7117
• Pages: 361-3
• Medium: Internet
• Language: English
• Citation (JAMA): Johnson Derek M, Liebhold Andrew M, Tobin Patrick C, et al. Allee Effects and Pulsed Invasion by the Gypsy Moth.. Nature Nov 2006;444:361-3

Abstract

Biological invasions pose considerable threats to the world’s ecosystems and cause substantial economic losses. A prime example is the invasion of the gypsy moth in the United States, for which more than $194 million was spent on management and monitoring between 1985 and 2004 alone. The spread of the gypsy moth across eastern North America is, perhaps, the most thoroughly studied biological invasion in the world, providing a unique opportunity to explore spatiotemporal variability in rates of spread. Here we describe evidence for periodic pulsed invasions, defined as regularly punctuated range expansions interspersed among periods of range stasis. We use a theoretical model with parameter values estimated from long-term monitoring data to show how an interaction between strong Allee effects (negative population growth at low densities) and stratified diffusion (most individuals disperse locally, but a few seed new colonies by long-range movement) can explain the invasion pulses. Our results indicate that suppressing population peaks along range borders might greatly slow invasion.

This abstract is part of PubMed, a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. PubMed includes more than 17 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for biomedical articles. See Copyright and Disclaimers.

Linked medical terms appearing on this page are added by Healia to help readers find more information and are not part of the original PubMed document.

The data herein was last updated on July 8th, 2008 and may not reflect the most current and accurate data available from NLM.