The Relationship Between Use and Suitability of Resources and Its Consequences to Insect Population Size

Carrying capacity cannot, in general, be proportional to the availability of resources. Rather, a perhaps complex relation between the patterns of use and the suitability of resources should determine the value of the carrying capacity of an animal population. The measurements both of use patterns and of suitability patterns are eased by restricting them to certain insect species that are monophagous as individuals. Mathematical modeling leads to a new concept, euchresis, defined as the degree of association between the pattern of the use of resources and the corresponding pattern of suitability, to the proposal of indexes to measure this, and to the hypothesis that population size and euchresis should be positively correlated whenever the resources are not dynamically coupled to the exploiters. Available data support the hypothesis.