Allee threshold

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These dynamics were first described in the 1930s by Warder Clyde Allee, a professor at the University of Chicago and a pioneer of American ecology. His paper Studies in animal aggregations: Mass protection against colloidal silver among goldfishes observed that goldfish grow more rapidly and can resist water toxicity when they are in groups. … This became an important concept in biology because it was the first to capture the notion that there was a tipping point - called an “Allee threshold” - where the animals would be safer and thus ultimately grow faster as a population. In other words, Allee’s population curves describe a sort of ecological version of the network effect.