Physics Department Colloquia |
Events During the Week of October 28th through November 4th, 2012
Monday, October 29th, 2012
- No events scheduled
Tuesday, October 30th, 2012
- No events scheduled
Wednesday, October 31st, 2012
- No events scheduled
Thursday, November 1st, 2012
- No events scheduled
Friday, November 2nd, 2012
- Anticipating sudden transitions in biological populations: Cooperation, cheating, and collapse
- Time: 3:30 pm
- Place: 2241 Chamberlin Hall (coffee at 4:30 pm)
- Speaker: Jeff Gore, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Abstract: Natural populations can suffer catastrophic collapse in response to small changes in environmental conditions, and recovery after such a collapse can be exceedingly difficult. We have used laboratory microbial ecosystems to study early warning signals of impending population collapse. Yeast cooperatively breakdown the sugar sucrose, meaning that below a critical size the population cannot sustain itself. We have demonstrated experimentally that changes in the fluctuations of the population size can serve as an early warning signal that the population is close to collapse. The cooperative nature of yeast growth on sucrose suggests that the population may be susceptible to cheater cells, which do not contribute to the public good and instead merely take advantage of the cooperative cells. We confirm this possibility experimentally and explore how such social parasitism can lead to population extinction.
- Host: Gilbert