MathBench > Population Dynamics

Mystery of the Missing Housefly

Examining assumptions

A while back we listed two critical assumptions of the exponential growth model. They were

  1. all offspring survive long enough to reproduce
  2. all flies have the same number of offspring every month

Then we investigated a violation of the first assumption, but that just led us back to exponential growth. Now we'll look into the second assumption, that all flies have the same number of offspring every month. There are lots of ways this could be violated!!

See if you can think of some before going to the next page.