Effects of pollution on critical population dynamics

Abstract

We investigate the effects of pollution on a population that is on the brink of extinction. In the vicinity of the associated critical point, the temporal scales of the population density fluctuations are found to be completely governed by the diffusive behavior of the pollution density fluctuations. Moreover, the mean value of the population density is found to vanish with a larger power-law exponent in the presence of pollution density fluctuations. Results are obtained within a renormaliza- tion-group calculation to O(\ensuremath{\epsilon}) (\ensuremath{\epsilon}=4-d, d being the spatial dimension).