小型哺乳动物种群周期性波动的自我调节假说

种群调节是种群生态学的一个核心问题。文章主要阐述了小型哺乳动物种群在其低数量期自我调节的4 种可能假说和相关的实验证据。其中, 有关衰老—母体效应假说近年已受到普遍重视, 而支持多态行为假说、社会生物学假说和远交假说的证据较少, 尚需更多的实验来加以验证。衰老—母体效应假说是在应激假说的基础上发展而成的。该假说认为, 母体质量会在整个高峰期的动物中发生改变, 并能够延续到衰减期和低数量期。在低数量期, 种群内的老年个体增多, 导致它们不能维持内分泌的自稳态, 可能通过影响后代的存活和生殖而维持低数量, 进而起到调节种群周期的作用。针对国际上研究的发展趋势, 我们还对未来的研究方向提出了一些建议。

Self-Regulation Hypothesis for Cycles in Populations of Small Mammals

Population regulation is one of the most important problems in population ecology. Compared with intrinsic factors , researchers who emphasized on extrinsic factors rarely pay much attention on the variation among individual qualities, so they can't completely explain the potential mechanism for the periodic fluctuations in populations of small mammals. This paper examined the main viewpoints and related experimental evidences of four hypotheses since the birth of self-regulation school. Understanding the low phase is critical in explaining population cycles. At present, senescence-maternal effect hypothesis attracts to most scientists who are devoted to study cycles in populations of small mammals. On contrast, little experimental evidence has been found on polymorphic behavior hypothesis, social biology hypothesis and outbreeding hypothesis, there is much work to be done. The senescence-maternal effect hypothesis is based on stress hypothesis. It proposes that a change in maternal quality occurs in animals present during the peak phase, carries over into the decline and low. There are much older animals in the low phase than other phases duo to a shift in age structure. The older animals can't effectively maintain homeostasis in the face of environmental challenges and may serve to maintain the low phase by affecting survival and reproduction. This hypothesis is considered to be a very hopeful one to account for this problem and is still lacking enough field data. Some problems and directions need to be answered in the future were provided.