I realized yesterday that my matlab code for my linear model was not accurately representing my model; when I made all the birth rates zero the Juvenile population never died off, which is what should have occured. The problem has now been corrected (my itterations were not properly working) and my graphs look quite different from the ones I had showed Meagan and Prof Day at our meeting on Wed. (Prof. Day I can email you my new pictures!). I looked at the stable age distribution and the dominant eigenvalue and found that the population will reach an unstable steady state and explode (this was conducted by using my parameters I had found in papers).

Today I found a new paper with a lot of the parameters explicitly written in it; this paper also includes various parameters according to population density, so this may help when I begin to add nonlinear terms.

I also looked at the distriubution of seasons according to the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), and I found that each seasons begins or ends with a solstice or equinox and lasts for approximately 13 weeks. I think that the seasonal distributions I used in my model (each 13 weeks) is a good estimate for the time being.

I plan to play around with my linear model a little more and then I will add a nonlinear term and try to code that next.