Here is the synopsis of our sample research paper on The Extinction Vortex in Regard to Bees
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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
This 8 page paper discusses the “extinction vortex” with regard to what it is and how it is used. It also examines such things as the sex ratio, population size and lethal recessive allele with regard to species survival. Finally, it discusses the apparent die-off of bees in the U.S. and considers reasons for it. Bibliography lists 9 sources.
Page Count:
8 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_HVExtVor.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
is important to study extinction models, and how these observations can be applied to bees. Discussion The "extinction vortex" is a term coined in 1986 by Gilpin & Soul?, who
argued that "as populations decline, an insidious mutual reinforcement can occur among biotic and abiotic processes such as environmental stochasticity, demographic stochasticity, inbreeding, and behavioural failures, driving population size downward
to extinction" (Fagan and Holmes, 2006, p. 51). In their work, Fagan and Holmes developed a database of "10 wild vertebrate populations" and monitored them over 12 years (Fagan and
Holmes, 2006, p. 51). They "quantitatively characterized the final declines of these well-monitored populations and tested key theoretical predictions about the process of extinction, obtaining two primary results" (Fagan and
Holmes, 2006, p. 51). First, they discovered evidence of "logarithmic scaling of time-to-extinction as a function of population size for each of the 10 populations" (Fagan and Holmes, 2006,
p. 51). Second, "two lines of evidence suggested that these extinction-bound populations collectively exhibited dynamics akin to those theoretically proposed to occur in extinction vortices" (Fagan and Holmes, 2006, p.
51). That is, these populations behaved the way theories had predicted they would behave. The "two lines of evidence" were these: first, they found that a certain number of individuals
in a population that was within a decade of going extinct "was somehow less valuable to persistence than the same population size was earlier" (Fagan and Holmes, 2006, p. 51).
That is, 50 animals within eight years of extinction were less valuable to the survival of the species than 50 animals 30 years from extinction. This may have to do
with the time necessary to replenish the species. The second point is that "both year-to-year rates of decline and year-to-year variability increased as the time-to-extinction decreased" (Fagan and Holmes,
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