talking about the physiology of animals and plants.

And how cells work together to make tissues, to make organs,

to make organ systems, to make us the hunks of meat

and vegetables that we are.

In understanding the whole organism,

it's important to know what's going on at all those levels.

And the same is true for Ecology, only instead of zooming

in and out on different levels within a living thing,

we can zoom in and out on the earth.

Depending on the power of the magnification,

we can understand a whole range of things about our planet.

For instance, we can look at groups within a species

and how they live together in one geographic area.

That's Population Ecology. There's also Community Ecology,

where you look at groups of different organisms living together

and figure out how they influence each other.

And then, the most zoomed-out we get is Ecosystem Ecology,

the study of how all living and nonliving things

interact within an entire ecosystem.

So let's start by zooming in, with Population Ecology.

The study of groups within a species that interact mostly

with each other, to understand why those populations

are different in one time and place than they are in another.

How, you may be asking yourself,

is that in any way useful to anyone ever?

Well, it's actually super useful to everybody, always!

Let's look, for instance, at the outbreak of West Nile virus

that struck Dallas, Texas in the summer of 2012.

In Dallas County, 12 people died from the virus as of the filming

of this and nearly 300 people had been infected.

But in 2011, the whole state of Texas reported only 27 cases

of West Nile, and only 2 deaths.

That seems kind of significant. So, what's up?

It turns out that this is a population ecology problem.

West Nile is a mosquito-borne illness,

and the population of mosquitoes in Dallas in 2012 busted

through brick walls like the Kool-aid man,

spreading West Nile like crazy.

So why did this outbreak happen in 2012 and not the year before?

And why did it happen in Texas and not in New Jersey?

The answer is population ecology!

Before we start solving any disease outbreak mysteries,

we gotta understand the fundamental principles of population ecology.

For starters, a population is just a group of individuals

of one species who interact regularly.

How often organisms interact has a lot to do with geography:

You're gonna have a lot more face time with folks you live near

than those who live farther away.

As a result, individuals who are closer to you will be

the ones you'll compete with for food, and living space,

mates, all that stuff.

But in order to understand why populations are different

from time to time, and place to place, a population ecologist

needs to know a few things about a population, like its density.

In this instance, how many mosquitoes there are in the

greater Dallas area that might come into contact with each other.

A population's density changes due to a number of factors,

all of which are pretty intuitive: It increases when

new individuals are either are born or immigrate,

that is, move in, and it decreases because of

deaths or emigration, or individuals moving out.

Simple enough. But as a population ecologist,

you also need to know about the geographic arrangement

of the individuals within the population.

This is their dispersion.

Like, are the mosquitos all clumped together?

Are they evenly spaced across the county?

Is there some kind of random spacing?

The answer to these questions give scientists

a snapshot of a population at a given moment.

And to figure out a puzzle like the West Nile outbreak,

which involves studying how a population has changed over time,

you have to investigate one of population ecology's

central principles: population growth.

There are all kinds of factors that drive population growth,

and they can vary radically from one organism to the next.

Things like fecundity, how many offspring an individual can have

in a lifetime, make a huge difference in the size of a population.

So, for instance, why do mosquito populations seem to grow

so quickly, while the endangered black rhino may never recover

from a single act of poaching?

For starters, mosquitoes can have 2,000 offspring in their

two-week lifetime, while the rhino can have, like, 5 in 40 years.

Still, a population doesn't usually or even ever grow

to its full potential, and it can't keep growing indefinitely.

To understand how how fast or slow, and high or low,

a population actually grows, you need to focus

on what's keeping growth in check.

These factors are, appropriately, called limiting factors.

Say you're a mosquito in Dallas in 2011,

the year before the outbreak.

Back then, the growth rate wasn't what it was in 2012.

So, something was keepin' ya down.

To figure out what your limiting factors were,

you have to first narrow down what you need as a mosquito,

to live and reproduce successfully.

First you've got to find your food.

Now, you mosquitos, you eat all kinds of things,

but in order to reproduce, assuming you're a female,

you need a blood meal.

So you have to find a vertebrate and suck some of its blood out.

Presumably there's no shortage of vertebrates

walking around Dallas for you to suck blood out of.

I have good friends who are vertebrates in Dallas.

You might even be able to suck some of their blood.

Next, temperature: Because you mosquitoes are ectothermic,

it has to be warm in order for you to be active.

And Texas is plenty warm,

and the winter of 2011 and 2012 was especially balmy.

In fact, the summer of 2012 was exceptionally hot,

which helps speed up the mosquito life cycle.

So, that's one limiting factor that's been removed

for Dallas area mosquitoes.

Moving on to mates: If you're a female mosquito

you need to find a nice male mosquito with a job,

and preferably his own car, because you know Dallas

is a pretty big city, to mate with.

This isn't actually all that hard because of the way

that mosquitoes do it, males just gather into a mosquito cloud

at dusk every night during mating season, and all a female has to do

is find her local dude-cloud and fly into it

in order to get mated with. Easy cheese!

Finally, space: And, ah-ha!

Because here we have another important clue.

Mosquitoes need to lay their eggs in stagnant water.

And if there's anything mosquito larvae hate,

it's a rainstorm flushing out the little puddle of water

they've been living in.

And since Dallas saw a pretty severe drought

in the summer of 2012, there were lots of pockets

of stagnant nasty mosquito water sitting around,

acting as nurseries for many, many, West Nile-infected mosquitoes.

So, when we look at this evidence, we find at least

two limiting factors for Dallas' mosquito population growth

that were removed in 2011: the constraints of temperature and space.

It was plenty hot and there were lots of egg-laying locations,

so the bugs were free to go nuts.

Population ecologists group limiting factors like these into two

different categories: density- dependent and density-independent.

They do it this way because we need to know whether a population's

growth rate is being controlled by how many individuals are in it,

or whether it's being controlled by something else.

And the reason these limitations matter is because they affect

what's known as the carrying capacity of the mosquitos' habitat:

That's the number of individuals that a habitat

can sustain with the resources that it has available.

So, density-dependent limitations are factors that inhibit growth

because of the environmental stress caused by a population's size.

For example, there may simply not be enough food, water,

and space to accommodate everyone.

Or maybe because there are so many individuals, a nearby predator

population explodes, which helps keep the population in check.

Things like disease can also be a density-dependent limitation.

Lots of individuals living in close quarters

can make infections spread like crazy.

Now I don't think that the Dallas mosquitoes are going to

run out of vertebrates to dine on anytime soon.

But, let's say hypothetically that the explosion of local mosquito

populations caused a similar explosion in the number of Mexican

free-tailed bats, the official flying mammal of the state of Texas.

And they eat mosquitoes.

That would be a limiting factor that was density-dependent.

More mosquitoes leads to more bats, which leads to fewer mosquitos.

It's pretty simple. When density-dependent limitations

start to kick in and start to limit a population's growth,

that means that the habitat's carrying capacity has been reached.

But the other type of limiting factor, the density independent ones,

have nothing to do with how many individuals there are

or how dense the population is.

A lot of times these limitations are described in terms

of some catastrophe: a volcanic eruption, a monsoon, a Chernobyl.

In any case, some crucial aspect of the population's

lifestyle changes enough that it makes it harder to get by.

But these factors don't have to be super dramatic.

Going back to mosquitoes: Say, in 2013, there's a huge thunderstorm,

a real gully-washer, in Dallas every day for three months.

That's going to disturb the clutches of mosquito eggs hanging out

in the stagnant water, so the number born that year

would be substantially smaller.

By the same token, if the temperature swung the other way and it

was unseasonably cold all summer, the bugs' growth rate would drop.

Now, the truth is, there are a billion and a half situations,

both big and small, that could lead to a population either reaching

its carrying capacity or collapsing because of external factors.

It's a population ecologist's job to figure out what those factors are.

And that is what math is for!

Our friend math says that any population of anything...

anything, will grow exponentially unless there's

some reason that it can't.

Exponential growth means that the population grows

at a rate proportional to the size of the population.

So here at the beginning of 2012,

we might only have had 1,000 mosquitoes in Dallas,

but then after, say, one month, we got 3,000.

Now, with 3 times as many reproducing mosquitoes,

the population grew three times as fast as when there were 1,000.

So then there are 9,000, at which point, it's growing three times

as fast as when there were 3,000. And on and on into infinity.

And in this scenario, the mosquitos are all,

"CARRYING CAPACITY MY CHITIN-COVERED BUTT! THERE'S NO STOPPING US!"

But you know that doesn't really happen.

I mean, it can happen for a while, humans have been on an exponential

growth curve since the industrial revolution, for example.

But eventually, something always knocks

the population size back down.

That thing might be a density- dependent factor like food scarcity

or an epidemic, or a density-independent one,

like an asteroid that takes out the whole continent.

Regardless, this exponential growth curve can't go up forever.

And when those factors come into play,

a population experiences only logistic growth.

This just means that the population is limited to the carrying capacity

of its habitat, which, when you think about it, ain't too much to ask.

See how this graph flattens up at the top?

The factor that creates that plateau is almost always a

density-dependent limitation.

As you add mosquitoes, eventually the rate of population growth

is going to slow down because they run out of food or space,

and when we get to where the number levels off,

that number is the carrying capacity of the

mosquito population in that particular habitat.

Now, let's apply all of these ideas using a simple equation that will

allow us to calculate the population growth of anything we feel like.

I know it's math but, wake up because this is important!

The city of Dallas is depending on you!

Let's calculate the growth of Dallas' mosquito population

over a span of two weeks.