Chapter 3. Donald R. Strong. 1986. Population theory and understanding pest outbreaks. Pages 37-58. In: Marcos Kogan (editor). Ecological Theory and Integrated Pest Management Practice. John Wiley Interscience, New York, 362 pages.

Keywords: ecology and its Siamese twin, ‘matheory’, trophic webs as community models, tall and narrow-wasted trophic webs for insects on plants, the stochastic complexity of trophic webs, prim and realistic theory in ecology, comparison of features of ecological theories between the prim extreme and various realistic approaches, some realistic perspectives on transgenerational population theory, effects of dispersal and age structure among subpopulations on population dynamics in stochastic population models, quasi-equilibrium and broad bands for density ‘regulation’, density vagueness is the lack of trend between per capita population change and density at medial and low densities, kinds of density effects and sorts of regulation in some population models, per capita birth and death rates as a function of population density, implications for IPM, Murdoch experiments,