  Despite great interest in techniques for stabilizing the dynamics of
biological populations and metapopulations, very few practicable methods have
been developed. We propose an easily implementable method, Adaptive Limiter
Control (ALC), for reducing extinction frequencies and the magnitude of
fluctuation in population sizes and demonstrate its efficacy in stabilizing
laboratory populations and metapopulations of Drosophila melanogaster.
Metapopulation stability was attained through a combination of reduced size
fluctuations and synchrony at the subpopulation level. Simulations indicated
that ALC was effective over a wide range of maximal population growth rates,
migration rates and population dynamics models. Since simulations using widely
applicable, nonspecies-specific models of population dynamics were able to
capture most features of the experimental data, we expect our results to be
applicable to a wide range of species.
