Population Dynamics of Small Rodents in Northern Fennoscandia

Abstract

The small rodent population cycle in boreal and arctic regions is one of the most zealously studied phenomena in population ecology. The rodent cycle was first described in the scientific literature by Charles Elton (1924), but prior to Elton, since the middle of the 19th century, many naturalists had paid attention to the periodicity of lemming population fluctuations (Section 2). During the past 74 years, opinions have oscillated from the denial of any regular periodicity at all in small rodent dynamics (Palmgren, 1949; Garsd and Howard, 1981) to the belief that the rodent cycle is a universal phenomenon, especially at high latitudes (Krebs and Myers, 1974). The rodent cycle has been attributed to a large number of mechanisms (Krebs and Myers, 1974; Hansson and Henttonen, 1988; Batzli, 1992), ranging from individual behaviour (Christian, 1978) and the force of natural selection (Chitty, 1967; Krebs et al., 1973) to proteinase inhibitors in the food (Seldal et al., 1994).