Peter Jagers(Chalmers University of Technology, SWEDEN)

On the Path to Extinction

Short abstract: Populations can certainly die out for divers reasons, the most basic probably being through stably unsufficient reproductive power (whatever the ground for that may be). Even in this case there is an abundance of paths to extinction. Still, if the starting population is large, a simple and beautiful pattern emerges, where random and determistic effects are of roughly the same order of magnitude. We describe this path and the time to extinction of large subcritical branching populations, and discuss whether mathematically 'large' could be biologically 'small' (=threatened)