As humanity plunders its only home and continues destroying the very life that sustains our ‘success’, certain concepts in ecology, evolution and conservation biology are being examined in greater detail in an attempt to apply them to restoring at least some elements of our ravaged biodiversity.
One of these concepts has been largely overlooked in the last 30 years, but is making a conceptual comeback as the processes of extinction become better quantified. The so-called Allee effect can be broadly defined as a “…positive relationship between any component of individual fitness and either numbers or density of conspecifics” (Stephens et al. 1999, Oikos 87:185-190) and is attributed to Warder Clyde Allee, an American ecologist from the early half of the 20th century, although he himself did not coin the term. Odum referred to it as “Allee’s principle”, and over time, the concept morphed into…
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