Volterra’s principle
Thursday, September 28th, 2006
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Volterra’s principle resolves a seeming paradox in environmental control- that an attempt to eradicate a pest may increase pest levels, if the intervention also interferes with existing predators. This writeup considers two such examples- the cottony cushion scale insect in the USA, and fishing in the Adriatic Sea - and derives the principle mathematically through consideration of Lotka-Volterra differential equations for predator/prey interaction.
