Individual heterogeneity in mortality mediates long-term persistence of a seasonal microparasite

One of the primary objectives in population ecology is to understand mechanisms that allow a species to persist or to be driven to extinction. In most population models, individuals are assumed to be equivalent within any particular category such as age, sex, or morphological grouping. Individuals within such groupings, however, may exhibit considerable variation in traits that can significantly affect population trajectories. Although ecologists have long been aware of such variation, they are frequently ignored to maintain computational tractability. The few statistical models that do incorporate such heterogeneity require prohibitively large amounts of data on many individuals, making them impractical. In California’s coastal prairie, a parasitic nematode, Heterorhabditis marelatus, is an important natural enemy, whose presence determines the strength and extent of a trophic cascade. Mortality of H. marelatus is strongly influenced by habitat and seasonality, which determines long-term persistence. Prior efforts to estimate mortality have suffered from difficulty in distinguishing between measurement and process error due to limitations in experimental protocol. In this study, we eliminate measurement error in the initial population size and focus on the true nature of the heterogeneity in mortality. By including individual heterogeneity in our statistical model, we are able to understand how this species is able to persist over seasonally harsh environmental conditions. Further, we extrapolate these findings to larger population sizes and illustrate that heterogeneous survival can have a significant effect on the emergent number of survivors. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00442-010-1844-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.