Abstract

This book chapter describes population research involving the use of Tribolium to study nonlinear demographic dynamics. It begins with a brief description of the life stage interactions that occur in flour beetle cultures. The remaining three sections illustrate different approaches that have been used to model these interactions. The first is based on the classic Leslie matrix model for age-structured populations. The next section describes an integral equation model, the "egg-larval submodel," for the cannibalism of eggs by larvae. The last section deals with more recent results which are based on the "LPA model," a system of three difference equations for the dynamics of the larvae, pupae, and adult life stages. Each of these approaches represents a different tradeoff between biological complexity and mathematical tractability.