Wolves And Rabbits December 1, 2009 A nearby meadow supports a
large population of rabbits; the rabbits eat the grass that
grows abundantly in the sunny meadow, and reproduce quickly, as
rabbits do. The meadow also supports a population of wolves that
eat the rabbits. As the population of rabbits grows, so does the
population of wolves, until there are so many wolves that they
overeat the rabbits, whereupon the wolf population begins to
diminish. But once the wolf population diminishes, the rabbit
population is able to begin growing again, and of course as it
does so does the wolf population, in a cycle that never ends.
The graph at right shows the cycles, with the predator’s cycle
offset and trailing the prey’s cycles. Ecologists who study such
prey-predator populations have determined that there is never a
stable equilibrium, but that the populations are cyclical. In
the 1920s, an American demographer named Alfred Lotka and an
Italian physicist name Vito Volterra, working independently,
discovered the diffe