Simultaneous enhancement of multiple stability properties using two-parameter control methods in Drosophila melanogaster

AbstractAlthough a large number of methods have been proposed to control the non-linear dynamics of unstable popuations, very few have been actually adopted for application. One reason for this gap is the fact that few control methods have been empirically verified using biological populations. To address this issue, we investigated the effects of two well-studied control methods (Both Limiter Control and Target-Oriented Control) on the dynamics of unstable populations of Drosophila melanogaster. We show that both methods can significantly reduce population fluctuations, decrease extinction probability and increase effective population size simultaneously. This is in contrast with single parameter control methods that are not able to achieve multiple aspects of stability at the same time. We use the distribution of population sizes to derive biologically intuitive explanations for the mechanisms of how these two control methods attain stability. Finally, we show that non-Drosophila specific biologically realistic simulations are able to capture almost all the trends of our data. This shows that our results are likely generalizable over a wide range of taxa. The primary insight of our study is that control methods that incorporate both culling and restocking have better all-round performance in terms of stabilizing populations.