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Senescence, the physiological decline that results in decreasing survival and/or reproduction with age, remains one of the most perplexing topics in biology. Most theories attempting to explain the evolution of senescence (i.e. antagonistic pleiotropy, mutation accumulation, disposable soma) were developed over half a century ago. Confronted with empirical patterns of survival and reproduction, predictions of the theories do not hold. New theory is needed to shed light on the determinants of patterns of birth and death.

My objective is to describe the theoretical foundation, analytical framework and empirical requirements for the use of the death distribution of live-captured insects of unknown age to estimate age structure in their population. I will start with a brief overview of several high tech methods currently used to estimate insect age (and thus population age structure), most of which are costly and all of which are limited. I will then introduce the demographic concept my colleagues and I developed as an alternative to the high-tech approach. Referred to as the “captive cohort method”, we show that the death distribution of live-captured individuals of unknown age can be used to: (1) determine the exact age structure of hypothetical stationary populations (i.e. life table identity); ii) estimate the age structure of wild populations using a simple model and reference life tables; and iii) estimate quantitative changes in population mean age and qualitative changes in the age extremes (young and old). I will illustrate the utility of this approach from the results of field studies on the Mediterranean fruit flies populations in Greece, and end with a discussion of the broader implications of this method in both basic and applied ecology.

L. R. Taylor (1961) and colleagues observed that, in many species, the logarithm of the variance of the density (individuals per area or volume) of a set of comparable populations was an approximately linear function of the logarithm of the mean density: for some a > 0, log(variance of population density) = log(a) + b × log(mean population density). This relationship came to be known as Taylor’s law (TL) of fluctuation scaling. TL has been verified in hundreds of species from bacteria to humans and beyond: in populations of stem cells, stock market trading, precipitation, packet switching on the Internet, measles cases, and the occurrence of single nucleotide polymorphisms. We will give some empirical examples of TL and some recent theoretical developments regarding the origins, interpretations, and consequences of TL.

Perennial tropical and subtropical plants inhabit inherently variable environments, where both abiotic and biotic features vary from place to place and during the life times of individuals. To address ecological, evolutionary and applied demographic questions, we employ structured models (matrix projection and integral projection) using a framework that includes stage (sometimes age) structure and environmental variability. Projection models are used in two ways, to track population dynamics and to generate sample paths of individuals across the life cycle. The former concerns ecological dynamics and evolutionary demography where fitness is measured as the (stochastic) population growth rate. The latter concerns life histories, life expectancies and the timing of other key events (such as age of first reproduction). In some systems we also address rate of spread across the landscape. Issues we address quantitatively by these methods include: the effect of hurricanes on the impact of native seed predators ; integrating selection on quantitative traits across the life cycle when selection gradients vary over time; trade-offs due to the cost of reproduction; how harvest regime of non-timber forest products affects longevity of trees; life expectancy of pioneer vs shade-tolerant tropical trees; the impact of rarely occurring long distance dispersal vectors to invasion speed; effectiveness of bio-control agents on invasive trees and shrubs; and others. As models are applied to different problems, new issues and new models arise through collaborations.

The 7 traditional classes of Vertebrates (3 classes of Fish, Birds, Mammals, Reptiles and Amphibians) encompass around 64 000 species and are by far the best known animal group from a demographic point of view. After having briefly recalled the reasons for the abundance and quality of the demographic information available on Vertebrates, I will review this information, covering the following salient features:

1. Most vertebrates have a discrete life cycle, with a seasonal or nearly seasonal sexual reproduction, and primarily age-dependent variation in demographic traits.
2. The demographic differences among Vertebrates can naturally be ordered on a “slow- fast gradient” best measured by generation time. From short-lived rodents to cetaceans or sea turtles, the change in generation time is at least 300-fold.
3. This variation is strongly linked in an allometric fashion to body weight within groups of species sharing a common general body “ground design”, with major differences among groups (e.g., Chiroptera - Bats- vs Rodents; Anseriforms - Ducks, Geese and Swans- vs Procellariiforms –Albatross and related seabirds).
4. In relation with the allocation of energetic resources, maximum population growth rate is inversely related to generation time, the longest lived species having thus the smallest maximum growth rate, and as a consequence, the smallest resilience to extra sources of mortality. Together with behavioral and physio-energetic features, this demographic sensitivity induces a genuine “malediction of long-lived species” in face of human activities, with many different illustrations, including the overfishing of stocks of large fish. It is particularly striking that the 5 species of Hominids beside Man are classified as “endangered” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Over the last 5 centuries, more than one species of Vertebrate got extinct each year.
5. Besides the dominant role of age, demographic heterogeneity within age classes has been shown as to be present in a growing number of Vertebrate species and may be quite general.
6. Dispersal patterns are less widely known, but clearly show a prominent role of dispersal between birth and first reproduction, with a stronger dispersion of males or females, depending mostly on the class of Vertebrates considered.

I discuss implications of these demographic characteristics of Vertebrate in a changing world, in particular in relation with climate change and the fragmentation of habitats.

Fertility levels decline to below replacement is a common trend; and it will lead to declining populations that press less on environment and resources but suffer increase in the pension burdens of pay-you-go systems. Funded pension systems transfer cohorts saving to consumption, and hence their pension burdens are invariant to fertility change. Comparing the difference between the pension burdens of the two systems in certain periods could provide relevant information to the decision on whether or not to establish funded pension systems to cope with low fertility. A time-referred cohort old-dependence ratio is proposed in this paper, which is comparable to the period old-dependence ratio at a certain time, purely demographic, and could be computed for all the countries and areas of the world. Examples are given for China, Japan and Republic of Korea, which indicate that low-fertility populations are sustainable, but require more sophisticated means to sustain.