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Is the Human Population Too Large?

Chapter 15, Problem 8

Populations that rely on stored resources are likely to overshoot the carrying capacity of the environment and consequently experience a(n)                   . a. demographic momentum; b. cultural carrying capacity; c. decrease in death rates; d. population crash; e. exponential growth

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Hello everyone. Let's look at our next problem. Population overshoot is usually followed by a major blank in population. Well population overshoot occurs when a population temporarily exceeds its carrying capacity and the carrying capacity uh is basically the amount the size of a population that a given environment can sustain uh multiple years or through multiple reproductive cycles. So the example would be rabbits that live off carrots and the rabbits eat the carrots. But there have to be enough carrots left over in the ground. So that next year there will be more carrots for those rabbits to eat. So you can imagine a scenario where one year there's a boom in the rabbit population and they eat up all the carrots and there aren't enough carrots left to sustain the population population the next year. So the carrying capacity would be in this case the number of rabbits that can live for one year while leaving enough carrots for the same number of rabbits to survive the next year. So that's the concept of carrying capacity. So when you overshoot the carrying capacity um you will see afterwards. A. Major and what you'd expect to see is a decline. A drop in the population because you've basically depleted the resources the population needs to continue in the future. So we would expect to see choice B. Decline. So looking at our other answer choices choice A. Was increase. So that's the opposite of what would happen. Choice C. Says overshoot. Well that doesn't really mean anything. We had a population overshoot. Um We're not gonna expect to see another overshoot because we don't have enough resources to continue that level of population and choice. D. Says both A. N. C. Well A and C. Are both wrong, so D. Is not our answer. So population overshoot usually followed by a major be decline in population. Thanks for watching See you in the next video.