Browsing by Author "Remington, D. L."
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Item Game theoretic model of brood parasitism in a dung beetle Onthophagus taurus(Springer Netherlands, 2009-08) Crowe, Mary L.; Fitzgerald, Meghan R.; Remington, D. L.; Ruxton, G. D.; Rychtář, JanWe present a game theoretic model of brood parasitism in the dung beetle Onthophagus taurus. Female O. taurus engage in brood parasitism when they attack a brood ball made by another female, destroy the existing egg and place one of their own eggs to develop within the existing dung ball. Brood parasitism is more costly than other forms of kleptoparasitism because an individual loses the total investment in an offspring. In this paper, we outline the behaviors involved in brood ball production and provide time estimates of those behaviors. The model is then used to predict when it is beneficial to steal the brood ball created by another female and when it is beneficial for a female to create her own. We also investigate how long a female should guard her eggs.Item On deterministic and stochastic models of kleptoparasitism(Taylor & Francis, 2009) Crowe, Mary L.; Fitzgerald, Meghan R.; Remington, D. L.; Rychtář, JanKleptoparasitism, the stealing of food items, is a common biological phenomenon that has been studied mostly with the help of deterministic dynamics for infinite populations. The infinite population assumption takes the models far from the biological reality. In this paper we provide a review of the main theoretical works on kleptoparasitism and then focus on the stochastic dynamics of kleptoparasitic individuals in finite populations. We solve the dynamics analytically for populations of 2 and 3 individuals. With the help of numerical solution of the dynamics, we were able to conclude that the behavior of the uptake rate in the population is mostly determined by the uptake rates at populations of 2 and 3 individuals. If the individuals do better in a pair, then the uptake rate is a decreasing function of the population size. If the individuals do better in a triplet than in a pair, then the uptake rate is a zigzag function with lows for even population sizes and ups for uneven population sizes.Item Proving the "proof": Interdisciplinary undergraduate research positively impacts students(Springer, 2012-11-03) Crowe, Mary L.; Rychtář, Jan; Rueppell, O.; Chhetri, M.; Remington, D. L.The math biology program at UNCG has been running since 2006 when we first received the funding from NSF. Every year, we provided integrated research projects at the interface of biology and mathematics to eight UNCG undergraduate students who worked in interdisciplinary teams. Up to date, our project resulted in 32 peer-reviewed publications and over 200 presentations; this demonstrates the extent to which undergraduate research can produce genuine scientific advancement. Moreover, our program also prepared UNCG students for rigorous interdisciplinary graduate studies and career opportunities and set them on a path toward productive careers as twenty-one century scientists and educators. We hope our experience will motivate and encourage others to pursue similar efforts.