Determining individual variation in growth and its implication for life-history and population processes using the empirical Bayes method.

ABSTRACT: The differences in demographic and life-history processes between organisms living in the same population have important consequences for ecological and evolutionary dynamics. Modern statistical and computational methods allow the investigation of individual and shared (among homogeneous groups) determinants of the observed variation in growth. We use an Empirical Bayes approach to estimate individual and shared variation in somatic growth using a von Bertalanffy growth model with random effects. To illustrate the power and generality of the method, we consider two populations of marble trout Salmo marmoratus living in Slovenian streams, where individually tagged fish have been sampled for more than 15 years. We use year-of-birth cohort, population density during the first year of life, an

SUBMITTER: Vincenzi S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4161297 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature