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Population control is the practice of artificially maintaining the size of any population. It simply refers to the act of limiting the size of an animal population so that it remains manageable, as opposed to the act of protecting a species from excessive rates of extinction, which is referred to as conservation biology. [1] [2] [3]
The practice, traditionally referred to as population control, had historically been implemented mainly with the goal of increasing population growth, though from the 1950s to the 1980s, concerns about overpopulation and its effects on poverty, the environment and political stability led to efforts to reduce population growth rates in many ...
Historically, human population control has been implemented by limiting a region's birth rate, by voluntary contraception or by government mandate. It has been undertaken as a response to factors including high or increasing levels of poverty, environmental concerns , and religious reasons .
It is a quantitative description of the amount of change occurring in processes investigated by evolutionary biology, but the formal concept is often extended to other areas of research. In population genetics, selective pressure is usually expressed as a selection coefficient.
Balancing selection refers to a number of selective processes by which multiple alleles (different versions of a gene) are actively maintained in the gene pool of a population at frequencies larger than expected from genetic drift alone. Balancing selection is rare compared to purifying selection. [1]
Related to biological pest control is the technique of introducing sterile individuals into the native population of some organism. This technique is widely practised with insects : a large number of males sterilized by radiation are released into the environment, which proceed to compete with the native males for females.
Overpopulation or overabundance is a state in which the population of a species is larger than the carrying capacity of its environment.This may be caused by increased birth rates, lowered mortality rates, reduced predation or large scale migration, leading to an overabundant species and other animals in the ecosystem competing for food, space, and resources.
Microbial population biology, in practice, is the application of population ecology and population genetics toward understanding the ecology and evolution of bacteria, archaebacteria, microscopic fungi (such as yeasts), additional microscopic eukaryotes (e.g., "protozoa" and algae), and viruses.