Trapper drove Hare to eat Lynx - CMS and NCTS Joint Seminar in Mathematical Biology
Abstract: The longest empirical data in ecology is the fur trading
records of the snowshoe hare (Lepus americanus) and the Canadian lynx
(Lynx canadensis) of Hudson’s Bay Company during the early 1900s. When
Entomologist Michael Gilpin tried to fit the Hare-Lynx data to typical
predator-prey models, he was surprised and amused by the fact that the
empirical data do not fit his textbook models for which the peak of the
predator in population follows the peak of the prey. Instead, the
Hare-Lynx data shows exactly the opposite, and hence the legend of
Hares-Eat-Lynx was born. In this talk, I will address a few issues
fundamental to modeling, ranging from fitting mathematical models to
data, to uncertainty of best fit, and to the best fit of models to the
Hare-Lynx system.