Applied Demography for Biologists: With Special Emphasis on Insects

This is the first book to comprehensively apply the fundamental tools and concepts of demography to a nonhuman species. It provides clear and concise treatment of standard demographic techniques such as life table analysis and population projection; introduces models that have seldom appeared outside of the demographic literature including the multiple decrement life table, the intrinsic sex ratio, and multiregional demography; and addresses demographic problems that are unique to nonhuman organisms such as the demographic theory of social insects and harvesting techniques applied to insect mass rearing. The book also contains a synthesis of fundamental properties of population such as momentum and convergence to the stable age distribution, with a section on the unity of demographic models, and appendices detailing analytical methods used to quantify and model the data gathered in a ground-breaking study on the mortality experience of 1.2 million medflies. Based on an insect demography course at the University of California, Davis, the book is intended for practicing entomologists, population biologists, and ecologists for use in research or as a graduate text.