Does competition for food imply skewness? (Q1080390)

In numerous natural and laboratory populations of animals and plants, overcrowding and resource (food) shortages tend to produce positively skewed and increasingly dispersed distributions of individual weights (as contrasted to symmetric distributions in the conditions of resource abundance). Stochastic models of populations of individuals (animals) competing for resources are considered to account for this phenomenon. The modeling is successful in qualitatively reproducing the dependence of weight distributions on resource amount and on the number of individuals competing. For a single laboratory population for which detailed data were available, one of the models employed provides an approximate quantitative fit. These findings provide one more argument that, in ecology and elsewhere, modeling of population dynamics should involve the consideration of interindividual variation.