Blog 1

To create the Tauntaun harvest data, we need to simulate the Tauntaun population through time. We’ll set up a 10 year population simulation, where we will track the number of male and female Tauntauns separately in each time step (each year). Tauntaun life history has been well studied by biologists on the icy planet of Hoth, and it’s reasonable to assume that life history characteristics are the same in Vermont. Individuals can begin breeding at the age of 1, and produce approximately 2 offspring per year. Individuals that are 0 years old are called “young” because they cannot breed. One-year-old breeders are called “recruits” because these individuals have been recruited into the breeding population. Tauntauns that survive the harvest and the natural mortality period are able to give advance to the birthday again. On the birthday, the animals that were 0 years old are now 1, and they instantly give birth to ~ 2 offspring. The animals that were 1 years old are now 2, and they instantly give birth to ~2 offspring, etc. These “fresh” individuals are now counted for the year 2 census. The Tauntaun population model requires that you specify vital rates, such as harvest rate, birth rate, and natural survival rate. We’ll track each of these rates by age, sex, and year, so we’ll need another array for holding these rates. One more vital rate is needed for our population model – the sex ratio of the offspring – but for this exercise they will be a constant 0.5 The number of individuals for each year is identified in the column ‘harvest’; we need a function that goes down the harvest vector row-by-row, replicating each row the number of times listed in the ‘harvest’ column.