News From the Field
Dispersal patterns key to invasive species' success
January 20, 2014
Using synthetic biology, engineers have tested the limits of the Allee effect, where a certain number of individuals are needed for a group to survive. While intuition suggests that the more places a species spreads, the more it will thrive, scattering a population too thin by forming too many new colonies could result in the ruin of them all. The results have implications for both ecologists dealing with invasive species and medical practitioners fighting infections.
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