Damon Toth
Analysis of age-structured chemostat models

A chemostat is a laboratory apparatus that provides a controlled, resource-limited environment for microorganisms.  Chemostat models are of considerable interest to theoretical ecologists because they can provide predictions with broad ecological ramifications that are testable in a laboratory.  I will present chemostat models that demonstrate how age structure in a population interacts with resource and density dependence, predator--prey dynamics, and periodic environmental forcing. Age structure can cause persistent cycling in all the models, even for a single-species model with no periodic forcing.  These age-structured cycles interact with predator--prey cycles to shift the location of Hopf bifurcations in parameter space, and they interact with periodic forcing to cause very complicated dynamics.