Lemmings and voles: present and future

摘要

Lemmings have long been attracting many population ecologists because of large amplitude and cyclicity of their population fluctuations and, in the past, assumed non-adaptive mass-migration at the peaks (but see Henttonen and Kaikusalo 1993, for a recent view). When I was asked by the Editors to write a comment on this Special Feature on "Population Ecology of the Vole Clethrionomys rufocanus, I remembered my young age. That is 40 years ago, when I published the first edition of my book "Comparative Ecology" (Ito 1959) in Japanese. Using correlogram analysis, I demonstrated 4-year cycles of the lemming and the arctic fox, and 9-10 year cycles of the varying hare and lynx populations based on the data from MacLulich (1937), Elton and Nicholson (1942) and Elton (1942). From this, I expressed my opinion that these cycles might be driven and maintained by a classic, Lotka-Volterra type, predator-prey interactions. (The use of correlogram analysis to demonstrate population cycles was first done by Utida (1953), when he supported MacLulich's (1937) view that lynx cycles do not reflect the 11-year sunspot cycles.)