concept

Depensation

The phenomenon where a population with fewer individuals reproduces worse per individual rather than better. This runs against ordinary management intuition: fewer animals should mean less competition, more food each, faster recovery. But at very low density finding a mate becomes hard, group foraging loses its efficiency, migration routes learned from others are broken, and in acoustically communicating species individuals are simply too far apart to hear one another. The most dangerous consequence: there is a threshold below which stopping harvest entirely no longer saves the population — it slides toward extinction anyway, too sparse to replace itself.